The Greatest Things 
in Religion 

EUGENE M. ANTRIM 




Class _E_8_[^J_ 

Rnnk .A&9 

Copyright N° 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 



The Greatest Things 
in Religion 



Being Studies in Some of the Christian Fundamentals 
With Sidelights on the ' New Theologies" 



By 

Eugene Marion Antrim, Ph. D., 

Pastor Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, Springfield, Mass. 
Sometime Jacob Sleeper Fellow of Boston University. 




Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham 
New York: Eaton and Mains 






Copyright, 1910, 
By Jennings and Graham 



©CI.A275o5~ 






Iv. 



WINIFRED VAUGHN 
c&g PRfe 

Inspiring Counselor, Wise Critic, Lover, 

Brave Sharer in All the Toils 

of My Ministry 



Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Is He Jesus or Christ? 13 

II. Do We Need a New Religion? 33 

IE. What Shall Be Done About Miracles? 51 

IV. Was the Resurrection of Jesus a Myth? 71 

V. Is There a Heaven and Hell ? 93 

VI. Is Protestantism Passing? Ill 

VII. Is the Church Losing Its Grip? 129 

VIE. What of the Future of Christianity? 149 



Foreword 

Things theological are nowadays in flux. Dog- 
eared traditions and worm-eaten creeds are being 
consigned to the fire. Christianity is on trial, and 
its fundamental tenets are being challenged anew, 
while some imagine they can improve upon them. 
Our age is asking, with keen and critical insistence, 
' ' What think ye of Christ ?" The question can not 
be carelessly parried. The Church must satisfac- 
torily clear up its own thinking on the Person of 
Christ before it can go on. Once more the storms 
of debate beat around His head. Our purpose, in 
this series of studies, is to discover the truth. We 
have no call to defend a doctrine simply because 
it is old and considered orthodox, nor to challenge 
that which is new and deemed heretical. We would 
first discover the truth, let it lead us where it will ; 
and this we would do "with malice toward none 
and charity for all." For, as Bishop Whately once 
epigrammatically declared, "Unless a man begins 

7 



FOREWORD. 

by preaching what he believes he will end by be- 
lieving what he preaches." 

Doctrine is not true because it is old, nor new 
either. The "modern mind" (a term sometimes 
illogically applied to themselves by a few thinkers 
who are forever taking a shy at some doctrine 
hoary with age or at some man of straw set up to 
burn and destroy), may be right or wrong; the 
1 ' ancient mind ' ' likewise. Newness does not prove 
worth, nor antiquity either. The former may carry 
a great deal of paint and veneer, the latter may not 
endure the fires of reason or the test of service. 
There are some light-hearted and light-headed peo- 
ple who, on the one hand, swallow a doctrine whole, 
if only it has been shouted with sufficient vocifera- 
tion, and there are others, equally uncritical, who, 
the moment they espy a creed, any creed, proceed 
to give it a lusty kick. Each is a stupid perform- 
ance: the first does his religious thinking chiefly 
with his mouth, the second with his feet. Christ is 
the court of last resort and the seat of objective 
authority in the spiritual realm. This authority 
is derived, ultimately, from God Himself, the final 
authority. Each mind is, in a limited sense, a law 
unto itself. By the inherent process of his reason, 
a man must bring all doctrines into the alembic of 
his own mind. But the standard of objective 

8 



. FOBEWORD. 

truth, set up by Christ in His revelation of the 
final religion, is, after all, the fan that tests and 
threshes, separates, and sifts out the wheat from 
the chaff. 

When these sermons were first given in Trinity 
Church, Springfield, Mass., many letters of com- 
mendation, and some of criticism, together with 
the request that they be put into print, were re- 
ceived by the writer. None of those received was 
more gratifying than the following letter from his 
old-time teacher and admired friend, the lamented 
Dr. Borden P. Bowne, one of the last letters he 
wrote, voicing anew that deep and abiding faith 
which always characterized him, but was an espe- 
cially impressive note in his last public discourses. 
Of course, we do not hold Dr. Bowne responsible 
for anything here set down. The letter quoted re- 
fers to a newspaper clipping, containing an ab- 
stract of the first study, "Is He Jesus or Christ ? ' ' 

Boston University, ) 

Graduate Department, > 

Boston, Mass., Feb. 11, 1910. ) 

My Dear Mr. Antrim: I am a good deal 
pleased with the clipping which you sent me, giving 
an account of your sermon. I agree with it alto- 
gether. It is a great mistake to fancy that our 
orthodox faith, with regard to Christ, is any worse 

9 



FOREWORD. 

off now than it has been in the past. Any one ac- 
quainted with the literature of the middle of the 
last century would readily admit that that was a 
time of much greater stress than we are having at 
present. Indeed, the fancy that things are worse 
than ever now impresses me as a mark of belated 
intelligence. It reminds me of the Irishman who 
assaulted a Jew and when asked what he was doing 
that for, replied that the Jew had killed his Savior ; 
and when he was told that that happened two thou- 
sand years ago, he said, "It is no matter — I only 
heard of it last night. ' ' 

I am sorry to find some men, whom I know very 
well, seeming to incline in that direction. I can 
only look upon it as a result of dwelling too long 
in the naturalistic camp. In any case, it is only a 
local and provincial thing, and one can say of it 
what Athanasius said of a heretical movement of 
his time, "It is a little cloud and will pass over." 
Cordially yours, 

Borden P. Bowne. 

But a few weeks passed when Dr. Bowne was 
translated and this letter was rendered thereby 
doubly precious and reassuring. 

Eugene Marion Antrim. 

Springfield, Mass., June, 1910. 



10 



Is He Jesus or Christ? 



" Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am ? . . . But whom say 
ye that I am? . . . Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." — 
Matt 16: 13,15,16. 

"I am amazed at Christ's purity and holiness and at His infinite 
beauty. The forms of religion may change, but Christ will grow more and 
more in the roll of the ages. His character is more wonderful than the 
greatest miracle."— Browning. 

" We have come to see that if we will not listen to Jesus Christ in His 
revelation of the Father, it is not worth while to listen to anybody else. 
He is the only one who has brought a Gospel worth hearing, and, we may 
be sure, the only one who has brought the Gospel that can move the hearts 
of men."— Borden P. Bowne. 

"Jesus could not mean so much to the heart, if He were not at the same 
time a problem to the intellect."— Fairbairn. 

" Jesus baffles only to allure and allures only to enrich."—/,. M. Sweet. 

" Therefore to Thee it was given 
Many to save with Thyself. 
And at the end of the day, 
O Faithful Shepherd ! to come, 
Bringing Thy sheep in Thy hand," 

— Arnold. 



I. 

IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? 

The antithesis, Jesus or Christ, originally pro- 
posed by Strauss, is just now being revived in some 
quarters. Those doing so affirm that there is a 
radical difference between the Christ of faith and 
the Jesus of history, commonly adding a denial of 
the deity of our Lord. They declare that the New 
Testament writings are largely fictions and inven- 
tions of hero-worshiping imagination. The mira- 
cles and much besides are ruled out by a wave of 
the hand. That they are really myths, underlies 
this typical assumption. "It its vain to make them 
conceivable, as natural events, and quite as impos- 
sible to imagine things so unnatural to have really 
happened, and all narratives of this kind must be 
considered fictions," says one objector. Nearly 
fifty years ago Strauss modestly revealed to the 
world his great discovery that the picture of Jesus 
as Christ in the Gospels was subjectively wrought 
by "the instrumentality of the mind, the power 
of imagination, and nervous excitement." Faith 

13 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN EELIGION. 

in Jesus, among His disciples, arose, he would con- 
fess, as the first effect of what was in Jesus, but 
popular conceptions soon transferred Him into a 
temperature in which they could not fail to put 
forth numerous unhistorical shoots, one ever more 
miraculous than another, in most luxuriant growth. 
What is the result ? A little group of German rad- 
icals, Pfleiderer, Zimmern, Jensen, A. Crews, out- 
Herod Strauss, and confess, one, that "the Christ 
of the Church has been formed out of those myths 
and legends which are the common property of 
religion all over the world, more particularly hav- 
ing their origin in Judaism, Hellenism, Mithraism, 
the Grseco-E gy ptian religion, Zoroastrianism, and 
even Buddhism;" while another descants upon the 
contribution of Babylonian mythology to the Bib- 
lical portrait of Jesus, and still another, as if this 
were not criticism run mad, soberly declares that 
' ' this Jesus has never lived upon the earth, neither 
has He died, because He is nothing but an Israelit- 
ish Gilgamesh legend." 

Taking courage from these bizarre extravagan- 
zas, even an American writer frankly acknowledges 
that we ' ' have n 't the means to draw near enough 
to the historical Jesus to become acquainted with 
him, and to determine His rank in the scale of be- 
ing. We can only guess each for himself as to the 

14 



IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? 

moral and spiritual features and stature of Jesus, 
and, moreover, it isn't important that we should 
know." Thus Christ did not create the Church, 
but the Church created Christ. Paul, unknown 
writers of the fourth Gospel and the epistle to the 
Hebrews, and even the Synoptists, created out of 
the colors of a vivid imagination and Oriental 
myths, the matchless portrait as we have it in 
the New Testament. The Church has since put on 
the finishing touches. * { Christ can not possibly be 
identified with Jesus of Nazareth. ' ' He is reduced 
to ' ' a name, a motto, a flag, to which its adherents 
may rally." Yet by a jugglery of words those 
who have, perhaps unconsciously, slipped the moor- 
ings of their faith and drifted into this theological 
anarchy, hold inconsistently to the divinity of Jesus 
and His power to forgive sins, but in the same 
sense only that they believe in the divinity of 
man, and the power of man to forgive sins. Now 
and then one consciously continues the same leger- 
demain of words. "Do I believe," says Mr. Dole, 
"in the divinity of Jesus? Yes, surely, in His 
deity, if you like. But I find the same deity in 
Isaiah, in Epictetus, in the great and wise Marcus 
Aurelius. Christ is the name of my better, divine, 
or ideal self." By which Mr. Dole proves his own 
deity. One is reminded of the witty remark of a 

15 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

friend at Arnold's death, ''Poor Arnold, he will 
not like God." 

II. Arguments not Impressive. 

1. "While such views occasionally capture some 
theological stragglers, they never have and never 
will win the serious assent of thoughtful men. 
They are not new, but are occasionally resurrected 
for polemical purposes. They have the grave- 
clothes about them still, though galvanized into 
life by some experimenting intellect, dabbling in 
strange elements. They will not long survive. It 
were about as easy, concretely, to prove the demoni- 
acal possession of men as their divinity. That one 
man can forgive the sin of another man, which has 
no relation to himself, is a scandal to common 
sense. How absurd it would be even for Abraham 
Lincoln to claim he could forgive the sins of Cesare 
Borgia or Judge Jeffries! Yet, like the return of 
Halley 's comet, such notions seem to have a certain 
periodicity and cause us to get out our telescopes 
when they return. They serve a useful purpose 
in discovering how unshaken the orthodox position 
really us. They also reveal some ambitious teach- 
ers in their true character, and serve to eliminate 
them as safe religious leaders. 

2. The original source of this antithesis, Jesus 

16 



IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? 

or Christ, serves to discredit its denials in advance. 
Strauss was a German critic and skeptic, so erratic 
that his views raised a storm of protest in Ger- 
many, while German universities, to which he was 
appointed, refused to receive him. In later life 
he published ' ' The Faith, New and Old, ' ' in which 
he gave up even his nominal adherence to Chris- 
tianity. Even an infidel may, perchance, discover 
a truth, but when he begins to talk disparagingly 
of Christ, we have a right to be suspicious of his 
views and sift them most critically. Doing so, we 
are at once impressed with the fact that, if there 
has been any writing of fiction, any creations of 
imagination, any romancing with the historical 
Christ Jesus, it was not Mark, Luke, John, and 
Paul, but David Friedrich Strauss and those who 
have wittingly or unwittingly imbibed some of his 
strange notions, who are guilty. Sky-larking with 
the truth has become a fine art with them. By the 
same canons of historical criticism they adopt, as 
Nuelsen acutely observes, a very good case could 
be made out, at some future time, proving that The- 
odore Roosevelt was a myth, nothing more than a 
personification of the tendencies and mythological 
traits now dominant in American life. The legend 
of the "Big Stick" would be due to Roman ele- 
ments, representing Jupiter's thunderbolt; the 
2 17 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

large eye-glasses a Norse legend, symbolizing Wo- 
den's endeavor to pierce through the heavy clouds 
of fog covering his head ; the hero, smiling and 
showing his teeth, would doubtless be due to Af- 
rican influence; while some obscure, remote, astral 
conception lies at the root of that rather puzzling 
feature, the popular "Teddy Bears,'' worshiped, 
at least by children, in almost every house! 

3. The fictions such critics weave are mere as- 
sertions, unsupported by evidence. Any one can 
make charges and denials, but thoughtful men call 
for the evidence. It is not forthcoming. Those 
who take a semi-mythological view of the New Tes- 
tament writings have the burden of proof on their 
shoulders. It is more than they can bear. A pre- 
conceived prejudice against the divinity of Christ, 
or His Saviorship, or the idea of any one paying 
Him divine honors, or the possibility of the miracu- 
lous, is no argument or evidence. The very oldest 
tradition, that of Mark, as scholars universally con- 
cede, nearest in point of time to th* life of Christ, 
contains all these elements. Taking them out of 
the records, by rude physical excision, there re- 
mains not a portrait, but a "faded daguerrotype ; ' ' 
not an object of faith and devotion, but a mythical 
figure disappearing in the mists and fog of un- 
reality. 

18 



IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? 

4. The Church did not make Christ. Christ 
made the Church. Any other statement is playing 
with words without meaning. If not, the disciples 
loom larger than their Lord. The minds of the 
humble fishermen of Galilee, and of Luke the 
physician, and of John Mark, and of Paul are 
mightier than Christ's. They themselves are wor- 
thy of worship for the creation, out of the impulse 
of hero-worship, mysticism, and "nervous excite- 
ment,' ' of that incomparable Figure and Person 
which men call Divine. That sublime Soul, that 
stainless Character, that transcendent Ideal, that 
majestic Teacher, that world Savior who o'ertops 
the ages and has ever been regenerating both men 
and society, leavening nations and empires, found- 
ing and spreading the Kingdom of Heaven on 
earth, the creation of the imagination of these men ! 
Why, here is a greater wonder than the Gospels 
contain! It out-miracles miracle! There may be 
some mysteries surrounding the divine-human per- 
son of Christ, as there are about all things deep 
and ultimate, but there is no such incredible and 
inexplicable mystery as this mythical collusion of 
Christ's humble disciples after His death. It has 
nothing to stand on. Even John Stuart Mill 
scoffed at the notion (as most men do, and must) 
that there were any among Christ's followers ca- 

19 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

pable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Him, or 
of imagining such a character, still less any among 
the early Christians of a somewhat later date. 

5. The temper of these views is not difficult to 
discern. It is humanitarian, agnostic, belligerent, 
and skeptical; it would deny both the need of hu- 
man salvation and the vicarious atonement of 
Christ for sin. The notions professed are not new. 
Those who hold them are the doctrinal descendants 
of the Jews who crucified the Lord, because, for- 
sooth, "He blasphemed," they said, "in making 
Himself the Christ, the Son of God." (Matt. 26: 
63ff.) Their feelings apparently are not unlike 
those of the Pharisees, who, when Jesus healed the 
paralytic, at Capernaum, both of his sins and his 
palsy, spoke up, "Why doth this Man thus speak 
blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God 
only?" (Mark. 2:7); and of those fellow-towns- 
men of His at Nazareth who, when He proclaimed 
Himself the Messiah, and pointed out their sin in 
not accepting Him as such, * ' were filled with wrath 
and rose up and thrust Him out of the city, and 
led Him unto the brow of the hill whereon their 
city was built, that they might cast Him down 
headlong." (Luke 4: 16-32.) "To those who have 
never touched the fearful burden of human sin and 
misery," says President Hyde, "with so much as 

20 



IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? 

the tips of their dainty fingers, the doctrine of vi- 
carious suffering, like all the deeper truths of the 
spiritual life, must forever remain an unintelligi- 
ble and impenetrable mystery. The doctrine of 
the atonement is self-evident to every man who has 
ever fought intrenched and powerful evil, or sought 
to rescue the wicked and the wronged from their 
wretchedness." The assertion that Jesus only for- 
gave the paralytic his sins, in the sense that any 
man can forgive the sins of a fellow-man, against 
some one else or against God, is absurd. It does n't 
even reach up to the conceptions held by the scowl- 
ing Jews on that occasion when they said, "Who 
can forgive sins but God alone?" 

6. Views approximating those of Strauss are 
suicidal. They are in the nature of parasites grow- 
ing on the tree of Christianity. "When the tree dies 
(and they would really suck the life out of it) , they 
perish also. An array of witnesses to this fact 
might be summoned. "You can not sever the life 
from the word," says Dr. Forsyth, "and keep the 
Church as a vitality detached from the message of 
the cross." "The error of liberalism," says Presi- 
dent Hyde, "is its mechanical separation between 
principle and its embodiment, and the tendency to 
dispense with important features of the latter alto- 
gether, a mechanical dissection of essentials from 

21 



THE GKEATEST THINGS IN EELIGION. 

non-essentials which purchases a barren rationality 
at the expense of vitality. ' ' ( Page 27, ' ' God 's Edu- 
cation of Man.") The deep root of it all is the 
growing detachment of this laissez-faire theology 
from the Bible, and its personal misuse. "An 
ultra-liberalism," says Forsyth, "in an historical 
religion like Christianity, has always this danger — 
that it advances so far from its base as to be cut 
off from supplies, and spiritually starved into sur- 
render of the world. If it is not then exterminated, 
it is interned in a region ruled entirely by the laws 
of the foreign country. It comes to life in a reli- 
gious syncretism which is too much at home with 
the natural man to bear the works of the Lord 
Jesus. ' ' (Page 25, Forsyth 's ' ' Person and Place of 
Jesus Christ.") "The final tendency of advanced 
theology is backwards. Like Moliere's Ghost, it 
has improved by growing worse. It relapses to the 
outgrown Deism of the eighteenth century." 
(Ibid, page 133.) 

III. Modern Constructive Argument for the 
Divinity of Christ. 

We have no desire to detract from the ideal 
humanity of Jesus, at one as He is with the race. 
But if He is to men what no other can be, He is 
also to God what no other can be. A recent study 

22 



IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? 

of all the published writings obtainable, of the the- 
ological schools of America, reveals that the trend 
is unanimous (except in Unitarian schools) in hold- 
ing to Jesus' divinity in the usual significance of 
that term, although the arguments vary in form 
and emphasis. "We select but a few hints from the 
trend which the modern constructive argument 
takes. 

1. There is the evidence of Christ's unique 
character. Jesus stands before the world as the 
One altogether sinless and adorable character of 
history, the one transcendent personality among 
men. Only the caviler finds fault with that por- 
trait of a blameless life which adorns the gospel 
pages, white as the heart of God. Perfect strength 
and perfect tenderness were mingled in Him, stern 
morality and infinite compassion. One instinct- 
ively feels when they have seen Him that they have 
seen the Father. ' ' I and the Father are one, ' ' does 
not offend or sound a jarring note. He was some- 
what severe with the Pharisees and the hypocrites 
and the money-changers, but rightly so. God is 
both love and a "consuming fire." Self-seeking 
and sordid ambition were absolutely lacking in His 
Person; self-sacrifice and the vicarious suffering 
glorified it. He never felt conscience-stricken as 
other men do, nor asked to be forgiven as other 

23 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

men must. He never was convicted of a sinful act, 
though He challenged His enemies to do so. They 
were speechless. Some did not fully appreciate 
His greatness, but those who were nearest to Him, 
as was Peter, declared, "Thou art the Christ, the 
Son of the living God." And so we would say 
with one (Lanier) of our own time, who got the 
vision of His radiant richness and purity of soul: 

" But Thee, sovereign Seer of Time, 
But Thee, O Poet's Poet, Wisdom's Tongue. 
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, 
O perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, 
Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ." 
Thou Art Divine ! 

2. The evidence of His unique relationship to 
God is witnessed on every page of the Gospels. 
Both ethical and essential unity with the Father 
characterized His every act. Functions and at- 
tributes are assigned to Him which reach into the 
divine plane. Never man spake as this Man, never 
man lived as this Man, never man wrought and died 
and rose from the dead as did this Man. Modern 
thought does not lay emphasis upon the virgin 
birth as a proof of Christ's divinity, because the 
New Testament does not. It lays greater stress 
upon His unique character. If that did not prove 
Him divine, its claim of a supernatural birth could 

24 



IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? 

not. But admitting His unique character, the vir- 
gin birth appears the most natural, harmonious, 
and congruous mode for the entrance of the pre- 
existent Christ into human life. 

Jesus' close relationship with God the Father 
and His possession of divine knowledge and power 
are illustrated in the miracles. He Himself, sev- 
eral times, cites this miraculous power as the proof 
of , His spiritual power. Witness the case of the 
paralytic, the reply to John the Baptist (Matt. 11), 
and His appeal to the Jews, ''Believe Me for the 
work's sake." Gordon himself declares that "No 
man is intellectually justified in denying the pos- 
sibility of the miracles of Jesus ; he does not know 
enough to deny." Even if it should be demon- 
strated, a thousand years hence, tha't all the mira- 
cles of Jesus were performed in accordance with 
superior laws and forces then unknown, but util- 
ized by the superior power and knowledge of Jesus, 
it would not detract from but rather add to the 
weight of their witness to His divinity. For, while 
to the human mind and causality the natural and 
the supernatural must possess a difference, to the 
divine mind and power the one is as natural as 
the other. 

The result of the sum total of these evidences 
was that the disciples of Christ, though inherently 

25 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

schooled and steeped in monotheistic ideas, and in- 
stinctively prejudiced against according any one 
divine honors but the great God, are unanimous in 
declaring Jesus Christ divine, the unique Son of 
God, and in paying Him adoration and worship as 
such. That the incarnation entailed a humiliation 
and self -limitation is alike the testimony of history 
and revelation. Christ humbled Himself when He 
forsook the glory He had with the Father before 
the worlds were. He grew in wisdom and stature. 
He was not "in Jerusalem and Chicago and the 
Pleiades at the same time." Nor did God vacate 
the throne of the universe when Jesus came to 
earth. That were a great scandal of thought. 
But Christ was filled, qualitatively, "with all the 
fullness of the Godhead bodily." 

3. The evidences of Jesus' self -consciousness 
and His witness to Himself are unique and weighty. 
He is never conscious of sin; He never expresses 
faith in God, but .always union and harmony with 
God. "I and the Father are one." "He that 
hath seen Me hath seen the Father. ' ' Whether one 
argues that this is ethical or metaphysical unity or 
both, it indicates in eitfc 3r case a self -consciousness 
altogether sui generis. "All power in heaven and 
earth is given unto Me." "Lo, I am with you al- 
way , even unto the end of the world, ' ' were Jesus ' 

26 



IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? 

parting claims before ascending to the Father. 
"If any man thirst, let him come unto Me;" 
"Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden and I will give you rest;" "I am the Light 
of the world ; ' ' " I am the Bread of life, ' ' are but a 
few samples of the calm and sane self -consciousness 
of our Lord's spiritual relationship to men. How 
absurd, even insane, they would sound on the lips 
of any other human being. Yet on Jesus' tongue 
they appear perfectly congruous. The ancient di- 
lemma confronts us here. Either Jesus was, as 
He claimed to be, divine, or else He was a knave, 
a megalomaniac, a deceived and deceiving impostor, 
who has hoodwinked sixty generations of history. 
Confronted with such a dilemma Christian faith 
humbly and reverently bows the head and ex- 
claims with Peter, "Thou art the Christ, the Son 
of the living God!" 

4. The evidence of the relation of Jesus Christ 
to human redemption, a::d man's spiritual depend- 
ence upon Him, is also mightily convincing. Some 
modern thinkers are willing to rest their proofs of 
Jesus' divinity upon this experimental truth that 
He saves them. It is an appeal to personal experi- 
ence, arising out of the claims and promises of the 
gospel, which any man may demonstrate for him- 
self. "The Son of Man came not to be ministered 

27 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

unto, but to minister and to give His life a ransom 
for many." "The Son of Man is come to seek and 
to save that which is lost." "This is a faithful 
saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus 
Christ came into the world to save sinners." "I 
am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." "I am 
come that they might have life and that they might 
have it more abundantly." How these words 
shout themselves, with exultant trumpeting and 
heavenly glory, to the hearts of men ! A myriad 
men would risk their eternal destiny upon their 
truth. No one but the Divine Son of God could 
have such vital and essential relation to human 
salvation as all this implies. 

5. The evidence of the progress of Christianity 
is a most impressive argument for the divinity of 
its Pounder. Christianity, though years younger 
than some of its leading rivals among the world 
religions, is now nearly double the nearest com- 
petitor (Confucianism) and fast leaving them all 
behind in the attractive power of its radiant Lord. 
Millions, for over sixty generations, have found 
peace, consolation, salvation, hope of heaven and 
immortality through faith in Christ. He has cap- 
tured the imagination of the ages. He is trans- 
forming the nations. Civilization and progress are 
but His handmaids. "Can you tell me who Jesus 

28 



IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? 

Christ was?" one day asked Napoleon. No reply 
being made, he said: "Well, then, I will tell you. 
Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I myself have 
founded great empires, but upon what did these 
creations of genius depend? Upon force. Jesus 
alone founded His empire upon love, and to this 
very day millions would die for Him. I think I 
understand something of human nature, and I tell 
you that all these were men and I am a man ; none 
else is like Him; Jesus is more than man. I have 
inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devo- 
tion that they would have died for me, but to do 
this it was necessary that I should be visibly pres- 
ent with the electric influence of my looks, my 
words, or my voice. Christ alone succeeded in so 
raising the mind of man toward the Unseen that it 
becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. 
This it is that proves to me convincingly the divin- 
ity of Jesus Christ." 

But, mark you, only those denominations which 
take the higher view of Christ's Person are pro- 
gressing and moving people to mighty missionary, 
evangelistic, and aggressive endeavor. Those de- 
nominations and cults which take the lower view 
have never wrought these wonders. It paralyzes 
endeavor and robs Christianity of its highest mo- 
tive force and attractiveness. The lower view of 

29 



THE GEEATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

Christ's Person is in truth suicidal. Those who 
hold the higher view may at times be accused of 
hanging by main force to some dead limbs of doc- 
trine, but they can never be charged, as can those 
who hold the lower view, with sawing off the living 
limb on which they sit. This higher view, says 
Dr. Borden P. Bowne, "has always commanded 
the faith of men and always will. If this faith 
should depart, the attendant religious notions 
which swarm in its vicinity would soon vanish also. 
When the sun has set, there may be twilight for a 
little time, but before long all is night. ' ' 

And mark you, it is not enough to know the 
truth. If Jesus Christ be divine, that ought to 
lead to instant surrender to His mastery, to adora- 
tion, and loving sacrifice. Sinful living is the 
greatest heresy in the world ; it is denial and deg- 
radation as well. Stand with me at Calvary and 
Olivet, and pour forth your soul in the spirit of 
these words, in whose glory Christianity shall con- 
quer the world: 

" Love that wilt not let me go, 

I rest my weary soul in Thee, 
I give Thee back the life I owe, 
That in Thine ocean depths its flow 
May richer, fuller be." 



30 



Do We* Need a New Religion? 



" For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is 
Jesus Christ."— .7 Cor. 3 : 11. 

" Undoubtedly our faith, whether it be of the orthodox or liberal type, 
must be reorganized. The reorganized faith of the children will not be 
very different from the faith of the fathers. Some excrescences will have 
to be lopped off or allowed to fall of their own dead weight under the gentle 
influence of time. Taken one by one its articles will correspond pretty 
closely to the articles of the traditional creed, yet they will be rooted in a 
central spiritual insight. "—President Hyde of Bowdoin College. 

" Thou art my lamp, Lord, and the Lord will lighten my darkness."— 
2 Sam. 22: 29. 

"For even the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to 
minister and to give His life a ransom for many."— Jesus. 

" I am the good shepherd : the good shepherd giveth his life for the 
sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the 
sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth : 
and the wolf catcheth them and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth 
because he js an hireling and careth not for the sheep. I arn the good 
shepherd . . . and I lay down My life for the sheep."— Jesus. 

" Who fathoms the Eternal Thought ? 
Who talks of scheme and plan ? 
The Lord is God ! He needeth not 
The poor device of man. 

" I walk with bare hushed feet the ground 
Ye tread with boldness shod ; 
I dare not fix with mete and bound 
The love and power of God." 

— Whittier. 

Cardinal Manning to Henry George: 

" I love men because Jesus loved them." 

Henry George to Cardinal Manning: 

" And I love Jesus because He loved men." 



II. 

DO WE NEED A NEW RELIGION? 

A dream we had, some time since, curious and bi- 
zarre, as such experiences ofttimes are. A minis- 
ter, it seems, entered a street car, knelt down in 
the aisle, and offered up this peculiar prayer: "0 
Lord, we thank Thee for the effusion of evolution ! 
Lord, we thank Thee for the effusion of evolu- 
tion! Amen/' and then the vision faded away. 
That figure with its weird petition has once more 
risen in consciousness as representative of a type of 
mind, now that we are having, in certain quarters, 
a recrudescence of an anti-religious naturalism so 
characteristic of the last generation. It has been 
provided with the label ''New theology" or "New 
religion/' makes a show of progressiveness, and at 
times even of orthodoxy, while in truth it contains 
a belated theology, a denatured gospel, or a de- 
throned Christ. It professes the utmost devotion 
to scientific truth and historical accuracy, not un- 
mingled with a substratum of philosophy, which, 
presented in showy verbiage, has a superficial im- 
pressiveness. It is chiefly characterized by its 
3 33 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

omissions, denials, and negations. The Savior of 
men has been lost out by the way, and the radiant 
ideal Portrait of the Gospels has faded into a dim 
and filmy wraith. The myth of Jesus Christ is 
the final obsession of such minds possessed; albeit 
such an extraordinary challenge of history and af- 
front to common sense as extremists offer need 
scarcely be taken seriously. Let us examine a lit- 
tle closer the extraordinary propositions made, and 
discover whether we do, after all, need a new re- 
ligion. 

Religion and theology are not identical. Re- 
ligion generically denotes a mode of divine worship, 
such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christian- 
ity. Specifically, it means one's personal relation 
to God and conformity to Christian faith and prac- 
tice. Theology, on the other hand, is the system 
of doctrines, conceived to be the statement of truths 
concerning a particular religion. No living reli- 
gion is without something like a doctrine. Doc- 
trine, however, does not constitute religion, but 
only what men believe and think about it. 

Do we need <a new theology? That depends 
upon the kind we have. Theology, or the attempt 
to state the eternal and essential truth of Chris- 
tianity, is not a static science and may be very 
faulty, whether new or old. If it is merely a re- 

34 



DO WE NEED A NEW RELIGION? 

hearsal of what some men thought in the Dark 
Ages, with its medievalism and scholasticism, we 
need something new. Like the belief in ghosts and 
witches these empty chimeras of the mind should 
be relegated to the realm of theological curiosities, 
characterizing a dead past. If, on the other hand, 
a particular theology is a freehand dealing with 
the essentials and eternal truths of the gospel, the 
propagation of religious vagaries in the name of 
intellectual freedom; if it tears out the very heart 
of Christianity, leaving but a medley of philosophy, 
semi-religious ethics, and moral platitudes, the 
world has no need of that kind of a theology. 

The attempt to force that upon the modern 
mind is doomed in advance to failure. Laissez- 
faire in attitude, humanistic in tone, and lacking in 
much that is essentially Christian, it loses the at- 
tractive power of the Great Magnet of the ages. 
Leaving behind its Source of inspiration and life, 
like a hopeless anaemic it is doomed to die of reli- 
gious inanition. "An ultra-liberalism in an his- 
torical religion like Christianity has always this 
danger — that it advances so far from its base as 
to be cut off from supplies and spiritually starved 
into surrender to the world. The deep root of it all 
is its growing detachment from the Bible and its 
personal misuse." (Forsyth.) 

35 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

Some of the affirmations of the new theology so- 
called, if true, such as the immanence of God, are 
old as the Hebrews' immortal songs and epics and 
the Jahvist's story of creation; if false, as in its 
denials of certain fundamentals of Christ's teach- 
ing, are merely the reiteration of that ancient 
skepticism which seems fated to turn up with the 
periodicity of a financial panic. It has various ad- 
vocates and forms. Seeking for some new thing, 
like the Athenians, they have discovered — what? 
That the religion of the future will not be based on 
authority spiritual or temporal ; in it there will be 
no identification of any human being, however ma- 
jestic in character, with the Eternal Deity; that 
the term "salvation" is synonymous with the per- 
sonal "safety" of an individual in this world or 
some other; that true religion can not have propi- 
tiatory, sacrificial, or expiatory elements in it. 
Another discovers that Christ was not the first 
Christian; that the real conflict of to-day is be- 
tween the New Testament and one who believes 
he knows better; that the religion of Jesus was 
simply the way a good man thought about God, 
not Christianity which He founded ; that we believe 
ivith Christ not in Him; that we pray with Him, 
not to Him. Still others, while not detaching 
themselves from the New Testament altogether, 

36 



DO WE NEED A NEW RELIGION? 

mutilate it by the denial of Christ's divinity and 
Saviorship, declaring men are saved by character, 
not by grace. They dispute both the possibility 
and the fact of the miracles of Jesus, and take flat 
issue with many of His words and teachings. The 
logical results of such high-handed criticism, sug- 
gests Dr. Forsyth, is that these critics should be 
led finally to pray for Christ, and perhaps the rest 
of us should be driven, in gratitude to this great 
benefactor and lover of the race, as the sense of our 
spiritual obligation to Him, to lift our soul as Par- 
sifal ends, "Redeemed be the Redeemer." 

"Lord God, who savest men, save, most of men, 
Christ Jesus, who saved me." 

We spare you! do we need a new theology? 
Not of this brand. Its vagaries, negations, and 
omissions invalidate it. We are suspicious. It 
doth protest too much. These revolutionary as- 
saults upon the faith are but "a little cloud, they 
will soon pass over. ' ' They are due to long dwell- 
ing in the atmosphere of naturalism. A mere 
statement of many of them at once disproves their 
credibility. The great mass of Christian believers, 
for sixty generations, have scarcely been so grossly 
deceived, and future generations never will be. 
Only a few ' ' modern ' ' minds, each with his own in- 
tellectual "big stick," holds such views; "the mod- 

37 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

ern mind," a composite of millions of up-to-date 
Christian thinkers, still clings to the historical and 
experimental reality of the Divine Savior, salvation 
not by character but unto character, the credibility 
of Christ's reported words and deeds, the trustwor- 
thiness of the New Testament miracles, the truth of 
Jesus' resurrection, the eternal glory, power, and 
attractiveness of the Cross. 

But do we need a new religion? Some substi- 
tute for an improvement on Christianity? Would 
Confucianism do? China is too weighty an argu- 
ment against that. Likewise India against Bud- 
dhism, with its three hundred million gods, its 
caste system, wretchedness, and awful degradation. 
Bishop Thomson, beholding the age-long result of 
Buddhism at the River Ganges, said, "This is 
Hell!" 

Perhaps some new theologian would like to re- 
vert to the crude and sensual polytheism of the 
ancient Romans. But, 

" On that hard Roman world, disgust 
And secret loathing fell, 
Deep weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell." 

Or, peradventure an eclectic substitute for 
Christianity, compounded of all the elements of 
truth in every known religion, purged of all errors, 

38 



DO WE NEED A NEW BELIGION? 

is needed? We shall wait until we see the com- 
pound before recommending it. Such attempts 
have never conspicuously succeeded. Let a man 
sit down and write one proverb that compares with 
Solomon 's ; let him compound his new religion and 
then offer himself to be crucified for it, and the 
world will take notice. Christianity is not a fail- 
ure yet. Let it first be tried. Let its ethics be- 
come the universal, social, and moral standpoint; 
let its Savior become the universal Redeemer; let 
the Divine Life, mediated to men through Christi- 
anity, become dominant, — His mastery, moral and 
spiritual law, and this old world will become very 
heaven. Christianity is the final religion. Its im- 
proving must come in the living of it. 

Christianity Essentially a Redemptional 
Religion. 

No religion or theology is true or final which 
leaves out the cross, an atoning Savior, a redeeming 
Christ. Any theology which does is not essentially 
Christian, for it has cut out its heart. It may be a 
system of ethics or a religious philosophy, but it is 
not the Christian religion. By this omission ye 
shall know them. The radiant, inspiring, and ideal 
life of Jesus will never lose its inspiration or 

39 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

meaning for Christian living, but he who assigns 
no meaning, in the divine mind or in human ex- 
perience, to the death of Christ, has denatured 
Christianity. It is an attempt to play the great 
symphony with second violins only, the motif con- 
spicuously absent. Such an omission makes light 
of sin. The vicarious suffering of Christ is the 
only hope of the salvation of sinning men, who 
never could dream of being saved by and because of 
their character. An ultra-liberalism which leaves 
out the cross is sacrificing the secret of power. ' ' I, 
if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." 
The attractiveness of Calvary has been the source 
of spiritual conquests over sin, and the mastery of 
men's hearts from that day when Jesus said, "I 
come to seek and to save the lost" until now. 
"Ministers of the cross have always been attacked 
as the cross has been. Wit has laughed at the 
cross, philosophy has sneered at it, sin has mocked 
it, devils hate it, but the cross still stands." (Chap- 
man.) 

We do not here and now discuss the various 
theories of the atonement, whether the juridical, 
the governmental, the moral influence theory, or 
some other be the right view; whether Christ's 
death was sacrificed, expiatory, or something 
else. We have a workable theory for ourselves, 

40 



DO WE NEED A NEW RELIGION? 

which is all that is needed. But a man may benefit 
from the vicarious death of Christ without even 
formulating a theory thereof. We must distin- 
guish between the fact and theories about it. 
Doubtless there have been many caricatures of this 
great truth. Certainly no ransom had to be paid 
to the devil before God could save men. We are 
the ones to be reconciled, not God. No theory like 
that of Caiaphas, that it was expedient that one 
should die for the people, is rationally satisfactory. 
Nor is it morally conceivable that the death of one 
innocent human being, albeit a sinless one, for an- 
other sinning human being, was either a demand of 
divine justice, or efficacious in atoning for the sins 
of those who were not called upon to die; nor can 
it be that God 's love was hindered nor His purpose 
thwarted in saving men before Christianity came. 
Love and power were His eternally, as well as the 
plan and purpose of redemption. "The Lamb of 
God was slain from the foundation of the world." 
In the fullness of time that yearning, suffering 
love found fullest expression in His only beloved 
Son, given to the world, that whosoever believed in 
Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 
His death satisfied the demands both of divine 
holiness and love, and has real and vital relation 
to the new life of the forgiven sinner. God's love 

41 



THE GEEATEST THINGS IN EELIGION. 

and holiness would never so deal with the sin as 
to make light of it. 

The full meaning of the vicarious death of 
Christ may be shrouded in mystery, but that does 
not discredit it. All ultimates, such as God, im- 
mortality, love, life, the relation of soul to the body, 
conversion, the death of Christ, are mysteries. But 
we may enter into a personal apprehension of them 
iall through vital experience, even when our men- 
tal orientation is more or less clouded. I may not 
be able to tell exactly how the Christ redeems me, 
but I need never doubt the glorious fact. 

Four arguments demonstrate that the death of 
Christ was vicarious and has the deepest signifi- 
cance for human salvation and the Christian life. 
1. The principle of vicarious suffering is in har- 
mony with the very nature of things. From the 
tiny amoeba which navigates the invisible seas that 
divides itself every half hour, up through the love 
of a mother that loves her child unto the death, up- 
ward to the very heart of God, who gave His only; 
begotten Son for a perishing world, it is woven 
into the very warp and woof of the universe. The 
death of Christ is but the highest manifestation of 
the suffering love of God. God in Christ suffered 
for sin. The thorn crown of Christ was pressed 
down on His brow, the spear was thrust into His 

42 



DO WE NEED A NEW RELIGION? 

side, the divine love was crucified on Calvary. 
" Other foundation Can no man lay than that is 
laid, which is Jesus Christ." 

2. The New Testament is full of unequivocal 
declarations of the efficacy of the vicarious suffer- 
ing of the Christ. "God commendeth His own 
love toward us in that while we were yet sinners 
Christ died for us." "He is the propitiation for 
our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the 
sins of the whole world. " " The Son of man came 
not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to 
give His life a ransom for many." "God was in 
Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. " "If, 
when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by 
the death of His Son, much more being reconciled, 
we shall be saved by His life." "Behold the Lamb 
of God that taketh away the sin of the world." "I 
am the Good Shepherd, I lay down My life for the 
sheep." "This is My body which is broken for 
you — this is My blood which is shed for the remis- 
sion of sins." Christ's death is therefore fraught 
with the utmost significance to men's salvation. 
One may not approve of this or that imperfect in- 
terpretation of the fact, but to reject the reality 
altogether can only be done at the sacrifice of New 
Testament Christianity, taking square issue with it. 

3. The efficacy of the vicarious death of Christ 

43 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

is demonstrable in Christian experience in the for- 
giveness of sins and the inculcation of a new life. 
* ' If «any man be in Christ he is a new creature ; 
old things are passed away, behold all things are 
become new." Whether Christianity gives birth 
to a life that is redemptoral in character, is pos- 
sible for any honest man to prove for himself in 
his own experience. Stress is sometimes laid on the 
ethics of Christianity as its great essential. "But 
Christianity," says Professor Royce, of Harvard, 
"is a redemptive religion as well as ethical. What 
is most vital to Christianity is contained in what- 
ever is essential and permanent about the doctrine 
of the incarnation and the atonement." "I do 
not," he says further, "for a moment call in ques- 
tion the original teaching of the Master regarding 
the Kingdom of Heaven as a vital part of Chris- 
tianity, but I do assert that this so-called purely 
primitive Christianity is not so vital, is not so cen- 
tral, is not so essential to mature Christianity as 
are the doctrines of the incarnation and the atone- 
ment when these are rightly interpreted. In the 
light of these doctrines alone can the work of the 
Master be seen in its most genuine significance." 
(Page 483, "Harvard Theol. Review," October, 
1909.) 

4. The omission of this most vital element of 

44 



DO WE NEED A NEW EELIGION? 

Christianity loses to the gospel at once its saving 
power and attractiveness. The old, old story has in 
it pathos and tears, love and laughter, salvation 
and heaven. The "new theology" leaves out the 
heart of the gospel, which is the Cross. None will 
be moved by such doctrines to conversion, Christian 
faith, or conduct; none to tears and repentance. 
It has no dynamic with which to draw men from 
sin. It has "crowned whim lord of all." Thus 
driven back upon the shattered remnants of their 
own character, men could as soon leap to the skies 
as to be saved thereby. The people are not fed 
with such preaching, though they are very hungry. 
In their great need Christ comes to them as Hugo 's 
good bishop came to Jean Valjean, saying, as he 
grasped the hand of the man overwhelmed by a 
divine love flooding him in his bitterness : ' ' My 
brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. 
I have bought your soul of you. I withdraw it 
from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition 
and give it to God." 

Certainly it is the preaching of the time-tested 
fundamental truths of Christianity that has won 
and is winning men. Wherever Christ is lifted up, 
men <are drawn to Him. Returning from a world 
tour of evangelism, J. Wilbur Chapman reports: 
"To-day wherever men and women are loyal to 

45 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

Him the work is progressing, and where the work- 
ers were in accord with the beliefs of Christianity ; 
where men were questioning the spiritual authority 
of the Scriptures, or denying or questioning the 
deity of Christ, the work was affected as by the 
black hand of death. ' ' 

No wonder the centuries have been drawn to 
the Christ as by a lodestone, and the song of the 
redeemed in a thousand moods and keys is the 
sweetest song of the ages — 

" In the cross of Christ I glory, 

Towering o'er the wrecks of time. 
All the light of sacred story 
Gathers round its head sublime." 

The Christian pulpit is no place for the propa- 
gation either of doubts and skepticism or the un- 
digested dogmatism of a theoretical or scientific 
doxy which leaves out the Cross. It seems too 
much like wounding Caesar with a Brutus 's stab. 
What is most astonishing is to have new religion- 
ists set themselves up after the manner of Louis of 
France, saying, "La Veritas C'est Moi" — "I am 
the truth" — when their gospel is logically as fran- 
gible as a St. Rupert's tear or as dogmatic as a 
triphammer. This pains the devout, produces skep- 
ticism among the unfamiliar with theology, and 
does not save a single man from sin. It becomes 

46 



DO WE NEED A NEW RELIGION? 

a serious question whether those who espouse such 
views can consistently retain a Christian pulpit. 
As for the people who look for light and receive 
none, we are reminded of that old Indian chief 
who came from the West to St. Louis in the early 
days, seeking more light about the Christian re- 
ligion, but who returned disappointed and discour- 
aged over his failure to receive light about it. "I 
came to you," he said, "over a trail of many 
moons from the setting sun. I came with one eye 
partly opened, for more light for my people who 
sit in darkness. I go back with both eyes closed. 
My people sent me to get the white man's Book 
of Heaven. I am going back the long, sad trail 
to my people of the dark land. You make my feet 
heavy with the burden of gifts, and moccasins will 
grow old in carrying them, but the Book is not 
among them." 



47 



What Shall Be Done About 

Miracles ? 



" Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent 
two of his disciples, and said unto Him, ' Art Thou He that should come or 
look we for another ? ' And Jesus answered and said unto them, ' Go and 
show John again those things which ye do hear and see ; the blind receive 
their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, 
the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached unto them. 
And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me.' "—Matt. 11 : 2-6. 

" Though ye believe not Me, believe the works : that ye may know and 
believe that the Father is in Me and I in Him." — Jesus. 

" For in Him we live and move and have our being." — St. Paul. 

"If God sat alone in the heavens, like a block, He would not be God."— 
Luther. 

If the immanent God were caught within the wheels of natural law 
and necessity, like a squirrel imprisoned within a cage, revolving it end- 
lessly, but unable to escape, He would not be the immanent God. 

" To all serious minds, part of the evidence of the power of Jesus Christ 
will always be the epic of miracle embedded in His career. "—Gordon. 

" Yet, ye who wait for those calm suns to rise 
That kissed our sires, when, to their awestruck eyes, 
Mirage and miracle made white the skies, 
Know, reverent skeptics, plighted to the truth, 
That miracles persist in solemn sooth ; — 
This violet I scan when spring 's astir — 
Shy beauty, sweet to the blue heart of her — 
If I could solve her secret I should pluck 
All meaner mysteries bare ; these roots that suck 
From some black soil the pigments that will paint 
A rose's cheek or make the senses faint 
With lilac or syringa— solve me these, 
And I will read what miracles you please." 

— Knowles. 



III. 

WHAT SHALL BE DONE ABOUT MIRACLES? 

This is by no means an academic question. Not 
alone without but within the Church have recently 
arisen questionings, doubtings, denials, and not a 
little loose thinking concerning this subject. It is 
now the point of attack or theological innuendo on 
the part of some who have been thinking on the 
naturalistic plane. Their mental processes all 
tangled up with materialistic conceptions of the 
universe, whose laws seem to be self-operating, as 
certain and unchangeable as fate, they have hastily 
concluded that no such thing as a miracle of ( any 
type is possible, and that only the gullible enter- 
tain a contrary conviction. 

No distinction is made between those well-at- 
tested miracles of the New Testament of high order, 
fundamental in significance to the founding of 
Christianity, bearing the marks of worth, dignity, 
and genuineness, and many alleged secular mira- 

51 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN EELIGION. 

cles, which, on careful examination, fail when put 
to the tests of trustworthiness and value. Some of 
the semi-mystical advocates of a strictly mechanical 
conception of the universe seem to forget there is 
such a thing as divine immanence. Or, finding 
miracles to be of little religious service to them, 
they forget that this is not the state of mind in 
which many, in perplexity, discover themselves. It 
is possible for academicians to become so highly 
specialized, even in religious thinking, as to be of 
very little service to those who look to them for 
the Bread that cometh down from heaven. They 
are not unlike Darwin's highly specialized type of 
pigeons, which developed bills so short they could 
not feed their own young, compelling him to bring 
in some of the common, undeveloped variety to pre- 
serve their offspring. Added emphasis was given, 
in our own mind, to this fact by a recent inter- 
view with a young student on this subject, whose 
instructor had raised more doubts than he had 
allayed on Biblical questions, and had notably suc- 
ceeded in unsettling his mind upon the great fact 
of the New Testament miracles, including that of 
the resurrection. 

Hence I beg you to believe our discussion is not 
merely a theoretical one. Doubts are like dragons' 
teeth, producing perennially, in varying forms and 

52 



WHAT SHALL BE DONE? 

modern guise, a new brood and progeny from an- 
cient stock, perennially slain. It is a remarkable 
fact that a question is not always settled finally 
when it has been repudiated by one generation. 
Like a cancerous growth, cut .away at one point, 
it ofttimes crops out again in another. Each gen- 
eration, as each individual, has to fight over many 
of the intellectual battles of the ages ere firm 
foundation is found for its own footing. To be 
in doubt is no sin, but a great pity. It enervates 
faith and paralyzes activity. Only the careless and 
superficial have never had a conflict of soul over 
truth. There is danger, however, in the process. 
Entangled as in a labyrinth, a man may never find 
his way out. One needs all the mental acuteness 
and boldness of storied Theseus before he can 
slay his Minotaur. Our purpose is to indicate the 
method by which the mythical, theological monster, 
which has been begotten by a spirited but, we af- 
firm, hopeless attack upon the New Testament mir- 
acles, may be slain. When we consider the argu- 
ments frequently advanced, the wonder is, as with 
the tree j toad and his rattle, so great a noise is 
made by so small a creature. But an assault upon 
this ancient fundamental of the Christian faith at 
once arous&s our attention. 

Curiously enough, the distinction between 

53 



THE GEEATEST THINGS IN EELIGION. 

magic and miracle is not made by many in their 
discussions. There is a vast difference between the 
two. Legerdemain awes and astonishes gullible 
credulity, while miracle produces faith. Magic ef- 
fects wonder ; miracle, worship. The difference be- 
tween the two is the better .apprehended by a com- 
parison of the trick of a prestidigitator and a 
miracle of Jesus. It is related that after a magi- 
cian had extracted innumerable coins from the dog 
of certain Indians, simply by stroking his fur, 
much to their astonishment, they refused to sell 
the dog at any price, and secretly conveyed him 
away and killed the unfortunate canine, only to 
discover that "all the silver coins had already 
been extracted." Contrast with this sleight-of- 
hand trick that noble example of miraculous power, 
sympathetic love, and divine compassion displayed 
by Jesus in the healing of the paralytic at Caper- 
naum (Mark 2). The former was an obvious hoax, 
ending only in chagrin and disgust; the latter was 
a masterful act of the Son of man, who not only 
released a palsied man from his physical disability, 
but produced a profoundly religious effect upon 
the spectators. 

"Whether any alleged miracle is historical fact 
or not must be judged on its own merits. Do a 
sufficient number of credible witnesses testify to its 

54 



WHAT SHALL BE DONE? 

occurrence? Is it in harmony with the divine 
character and worthy of His great purposes? Does 
it manifestly serve a high moral and spiritual end 
and impress men healthfully? Weighed by these 
criteria, the false and the true are as readily dis- 
tinguishable as stubble and gold. It is needless 
to add that the recorded miracles of Jesus glori- 
ously stand the test. 

Penetrating deeper than the examination of a 
concrete miracle in particular, the abstract argu- 
ments against the possibility of the miraculous are 
shallow and illogical. To cite but one or two ex- 
amples: Hume defines .a miracle as "a transgres- 
sion of a law of nature by a particular volition of 
Deity.' ' Thus defined, he repudiates it as impos- 
sible and incredible. Put in a slightly different 
form, it is alleged that "a miracle is a violation 
of the observed uniformity of Nature, and there- 
fore unscientific and irrational." But no Chris- 
tian theist nowadays would accept such a defini- 
tion. These contentions rest on two assumptions 
equally false and untenable. 1. That a miracle is a 
transgression or violation of a law of nature is a 
pure assumption, and probably a false one. It is 
not necessarily a violation at all, but may be only 
the exercise of a higher or more powerful law which 
for the time being matches or neutralizes other 

55 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

natural laws. Had our scientific friend, the 
doubter of the miraculous, never seen an aeroplane 
in flight, he might deny, with much weight of his- 
toricity and improbability to emphasize his argu- 
ment, that any material device heavier than air 
had been or could be so constructed as to lift a 
man from the earth and carry him in flight. He 
could stoutly and with some show of reason main- 
tain that such a manifest absurdity had never been 
observed by him ; that it would, in truth, be a vio- 
lation of the law of gravity which holds material 
substances, heavier than air, down to the earth. 
Our theoretical doubter might rise to remark that 
only those persons with as light a mentality as 
Darius Green, who came to catastrophe in his flying 
machine, would even dream of such an impossibil- 
ity. Nothing would awaken him except a collision 
with the cold, hard, practical fact that the "Wright 
Brothers had achieved the feat anyway, his theories 
to the contrary notwithstanding. By the same ar- 
gument the flight of a bird is a constant miracle, 
being a " violation" also of law. The lark, which 
by superior powers uses its wings and the very air 
itself to transgress the law of gravity as it rides 
off into the morning to hymn its matins at heaven 's 
gate, would be theoretically an impossibility. In- 
deed, the placing of a burden on our backs by 

56 



WHAT SHALL BE DONE? 

superior physical strength, or the lifting of a book 
from the table by the same sign, would be violat- 
ing Nature's laws. Were these things not so com- 
mon-place, some wiseacre would even now be print- 
ing a book explaining their impossibility. The 
falsity of the assumption is sufficiently apparent. 
No miracle recorded in the New Testament is the- 
oretically impossible or incredible when conceived 
as the result of the operation of superior knowledge 
and the possession of superior laws and powers on 
the part of the miracle-worker. By the same sign, 
the possibility of talking across long distances, 
through the operation of that great modern inven- 
tion, wireless telegraphy, would to the patriarchs 
have seemed credible only as the result of a mira- 
cle, if indeed it would not have been considered a 
fantastic dream. By the same method of argu- 
ment as that offered against the possibility of mir- 
acles, Abraham and Job, Moses and D.avid would 
be perfectly justified in doubting or denying the 
probability of such a mode of communication. 
Would it not have been considered a miracle, in- 
deed, if Lot had telegraphed by wireless to Abra- 
ham for aid when he had been captured and car- 
ried off by the barbarous kings of the desert, and 
not have been compelled to await the result of the 
summons of a swift but weary footman, who ran 

57 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

at all speed over the sandy miles intervening? If 
Moses could only have told Pharaoh by wireless 
what God threatened if he did not release the He- 
brew children, it would have seemed a greater won- 
der than the rod and flies and frogs that afflicted 
Egypt at his command. How astonished would 
Zaccheus have been to receive a wireless communi- 
cation from Jesus when He was many miles from 
Jericho, stating He would dine with him on a given 
day ! The limits of such plays of the imagination 
are boundless. According to the light and knowl- 
edge of the ancients such an event was never even 
dreamed of, and would scarcely have been credited, 
if affirmed, because they could not relate it to the 
natural laws of which they were then cognizant. 
It would pass their powers of comprehension and 
experience and be considered a miracle. Yet we 
know such to be contrary to fact, and by superior 
knowledge and use of natural laws men are able to 
achieve these wonders. 

2. The second false assumption in Hume's defi- 
nition is that he, by inference, rules out the imma- 
nent God from vital relation to the ordinary laws of 
nature, and draws a baseless causal distinction be- 
tween the natural and the supernatural. Nature, 
in this loose mode of thinking, is conceived as a 
closed system, the offspring of unchanging and 

58 



WHAT SHALL BE DONE? 

inviolable necessity, a mechanism as certain as fate 
in its operations. Inasmuch as these rationalists 
have never seen God anywhere, whether among the 
stars, or on the seas or upon the earth, they hastily 
conclude that there is no need of the hypothesis of 
an immanent God, in whom we live and move and 
have our being; or if there is a God He certainly 
never issues any order; energizes by His will or 
intelligence to vary the ordinary mode of the ope- 
ration of natural laws, or neutralizes them by His 
supreme power, never brings superior forces to 
bear upon, outweigh, or counterbalance the uni- 
form mode of the natural process. Wise fool ! who 
hath said in his heart there is no God ; or who hath 
vainly imagined he knew all about the great God ; 
who illogically inferred that either natural or 
supernatural could exist without Him, or that He 
could not neutralize or change the operation of any 
law or force in the universe which He created and 
upholds by the word of His might! We are re- 
minded of Chesterfield's sophistry when he said, 
1 ' I have lived to be an old man and have never seen 
God." Or Lalande's profound acumen, who de- 
clared, "I have swept the starry heavens with my 
telescope and have nowhere found any traces of 
God." The truth is, no philosophical doctrine 
now-a-days has such intellectual respectability or 

59 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

scientific status as that of Divine Immanence. By 
which is meant that all laws and forces of nature, 
all potencies and possibilities of the universe de- 
pend upon His living will and intelligence. The 
natural, as well as the supernatural, therefore has 
its abiding source and cause in this fundamental 
reality, the eternal will and intelligence of the 
immanent God. A natural event is one which 
comes in the uniform and familiar order; the 
miraculous is one which defies reduction to the 
ordinary rule, and is meant to attract the attention 
of men or transfix their minds so as to awaken 
them from immersion in the materialism of sense, 
or produce some great moral or spiritual effect. 
God would certainly not disturb the sanity of men 
by frequent deviations from His customary ways 
of doing things. Any other course would produce 
madness among men. Think, for a moment, what 
absolute chaos would result if we could not depend 
upon the uniform operation of the law of gravity. 
But why should it be thought a thing incredible 
with any theist in these days, that He who holds 
all laws and forces in His hands, as a mighty 
charioteer would his fiery steeds, could not guide 
them, drop a rein perchance; cause them to race 
and charge, or grow still and calm under the guid- 
ance of His mighty hand? The burden of proof is 

60 



WHAT SHALL BE DONE? 

on the objector. His a priori assumption of the 
impossibility of a miracle, as an expression of the 
will of the immanent God, begs the question. 

Another academic argument against miracles 
perennially put forth is that we of this day and age 
have never seen an authenticated miracle. They 
are not in harmony with the present experience 
and observation of mankind, it is said, and there 
is a growing disposition among scientific men to 
deny all alleged miracles, including those re- 
corded in the New Testament as incredible. They 
are empirically improbable, and the records of 
these marvelous events are to be accounted for on 
the basis of hero-worship, and the imaginative 
romancing of a crude and uncritical age when the 
bizarre, the marvelous, and the magical were super- 
stitiously credited by popular credulity. They are 
relics of a period of superstition and mythology, 
as the advance of modern knowledge and science 
has demonstrated. But hold! such hasty infer- 
ences are not new. Young Gideon himself thus 
addressed his God over 1,200 years before Christ: 
"0, my Lord, if the Lord be with us, why is all 
this befallen us? And where are all His miracles 
which our fathers told us of?" (Judges 6: 13.) 
Yet this self-same Gideon had a demonstration 
later of God's miraculous power when it pleased 

61 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

Hjm to exercise it. Because men can not themselves 
see with their own eyes the works of God they are 
tempted to cast aspersion on their reality. How 
convincing a demonstration is it for one primed 
and plumed in the proud position of modern 
science to deny miracles, because, forsooth, he has 
never seen one. We have never seen a mastodon, 
a plesiosaurus, a pterodactl, nor a multitude of 
paleontological creatures now extinct. Yet their 
discovery and classification, through fossils, are the 
proud trophies of modern science. Nevertheless, 
no one living ever saw these strange creatures, 
whose bones are wired and displayed in museums. 
Nor could one readily refute the obstinate igno- 
ramus who never saw the inside of a museum, if 
he should insist upon a similar argument of denial. 
A showy attempt has recently been made by a 
popular theologian to demonstrate that belief in 
the miracles of the New Testament has no religious 
value, and that the New Testament revelation of 
Christianity would be uninjured by their entire 
surrender. He asserts that he is not concerned 
with a destruction of belief in miracles, but rather 
desires to propose a method of looking at the 
essentials of the Christian faith that will allay 
the perplexities of some within the pale of Christi- 
anity itself, who are honestly suspicious of the 

62 



WHAT SHALL BE DONE? 

reality of the miraculous. Miracles, he declares, 
have been under suspicion among educated minds 
in all ages. "Miracles have gone because the 
fashion of the world is against them. ' ' The di- 
lemma in which he finds himself is this, "that 
while the denial of piracies can not be logically 
sustained, the reality of miracles is unlikely. 
Miracles are logical possibilities and natural im- 
probabilities. ' ' "The unverifiable, ' ' he adds, 
"can never remain an essential part of reasonable 
faith.' ' The universe is a mechanism, the ope- 
ration of its laws as certain as fate, any suspension 
or violation of them, antecedently discredited by 
science. Proceeding, he attempts to show how 
limited a relation a belief in miracles bears to vital 
faith, and that the great recorded miracles of the 
New Testament, including Jesus' resurrection, 
really becloud the facts they were designed to glo- 
rify. In fine, he never has had any religious use 
for miracles, and thinks others do not regard them 
as essential. 

The theologian in question begins by declaring 
he has no interest in denying miracles, proceeds 
first to cast doubt upon them, and then to discredit 
them with patronizing compassion on those who 
believe them. Writing, as he claims, to allay 
doubts, he at once raises and multiplies them. His 

63 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

attitude is either a big "If" or a big "Nay." 
This would be fatal to the faith of many Chris- 
tians. In his loose method of thinking, a fatalistic 
and mechanical conception of the universe is pre- 
supposed, and the immanent God is thus shut up 
within the necessities of a materialistic mechanism, 
like a blind Samson, grinding in the mills of the 
Philistines. Betraying some characteristics of a 
mystic, he wings his way to the stars, and being 
far above any need of an historical or miraculous 
ladder, up which others must toilsomely climb, he 
kicks it from beneath the feet of those who are 
not blessed with wings. Nor can any amount of 
explanation save his discussion from a practical 
discrediting of the great facts of the Christian re- 
ligion, including the resurrection of Jesus, on 
which the Christian hope of immortality is based. 
By implication also, his argument results in a 
virtual abrogation of that miracle of miracles, the 
the Person of Jesus Christ. When those within 
the pale of the Christian Church begin to cast 
suspicion on the New Testament miracles, it is 
time to ask where they are drifting. The end can 
only mean religious anarchy. 

Let us observe, in conclusion, how the thorough- 
going application of the abstract denial of miracles 
would affect the New Testament records them- 

64 



WHAT SHALL BE DONE? 

selves. One might as well take an ax and literally 
hew them to pieces, as to attempt to cut out the 
miracles of Jesus and their intimately related con- 
text as recorded in any of the Gospels. Mark, the 
simplest, earliest and concededly best accredited, 
will serve as an example. Expunging the miracles 
from the text, but a few choice unrelated sayings 
and incidents remain. This new doxy would have 
to begin by gouging out the baptism of our Lord 
and the healings at Capernaum from Chapter one, 
leaving only a half dozen lines of Jesus' early mes- 
sage. Practically all of Chapter two must go with 
the restoration of the paralytic. Too, the multi- 
tude without it would have had little cause to 
resort to the seaside. From Chapter three would 
be discarded the healing of the man with the 
withered hand, and in addition the charges of 
Jesus' enemies, who confessedly could neither deny 
or discredit His healing power, but merely ac- 
cused Him of working these miracles by the power 
of Beelzebub, the prince of devils. The whole of 
Chapter five must be omitted, with its cure of the 
man afflicted with a legion of devils; the woman 
with an issue of blood and the raising of Jairus' 
daughter. In Chapter six Jesus' charge to the 
seventy must be mutilated, as He gave them miracu- 
lous power, together with instructions how to use 
5 65 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

it. The narration of Jesus' walking on the water 
must go. In Chapter seven but one-half would 
remain, expunging the healing of the Syropheni- 
cian's daughter and the cure of the blind man. 
The account of the feeding of the four thousand 
with the loaves and fishes must be denied, as also 
the narratives of the transfiguration on the 
mount and the healing of the demoniac boy in 
Chapter nine. I need not proceed. The book 
would be so mutilated as to leave but a sorry 
residue behind, unconsigned to the wastebasket. 
One might just as well tear the leaves of his New 
Testament to pieces and expect to have a perfect 
portrait of Jesus, and derive spiritual uplift, light, 
comfort, and salvation from the process. The 
reality of Jesus Christ Himself and the great facts 
of His incarnation, His sonship, His sinlessness, His 
lofty words clear as light, His acts and deeds, and 
finally His resurrection after the crucifixion are in- 
controvertible as history, and are by no means the 
introduction into the "supreme sanctuary of hu- 
manity, of the vulgar appeal to sense, the tricks 
and feats of the wizard." If there have been any 
feats and tricks of the wizard, they are the en- 
deavor of the new doxy to destroy some of the 
foundation pillars of Christianity and expect the 

66 



WHAT SHALL BE DONE? 

superstructure to survive. We do not fear, how- 
ever. They have but a feeble strength. They will 
not make a great impression. The glory and 
wonder of Christ abide. 

11 Hammer away, ye hostile bands, 
Your hammers break, the anvil stands." 



67 



Was the Resurrection of Jesus 
a Myth? 



" And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith 
is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God ; because we 
have testified of God that He raised up Christ."—/ Cor. 15 : 14, 15. 

" With regard to this Christian faith, I wish to say, as a person having 
some knowledge of the standing of such doctrines in philosophy and in the 
court of reason, that our old faith is at least as rational as any other. It 
can give as good an account of itself as any other. And then the ' survival 
of the fittest ' takes the case, and finally hands down the decision. It has 
been handing down one, and it has never been reversed. From that 
decision there is no appeal."— B orden P. Bowne. 

"The first of all gospels is that a lie can not endure forever." — Carlyle. 

" For the great hereafter I trust in the Infinite Love as it is expressed to 
me in the life and death of my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ."— J". G. 
Holland. (Engraved as an epitaph on his tombstone in the Springfield 
cemetery.) 

" Just as science finds in all phenomena the manifestation of an 
unseen, ever-present Force, so the investigator to-day, turning over the 
Christian records, feels himself at every point in contact with the mystery 
that made them possible. It represents, with the accuracy of a hair 
balance, the impression made upon its writers by Christ's personality." — 
Brierley. 

" Let our windmills and pulp-beaters run a little longer, and we will 
turn you out a body of divinity to please the prettiest sentiment. The 
name of Jesus still appears, not in the constitution, but in the by-laws. He 
has an influential, disciplinary place as sergeant-at-arms,- but He does not 
sit with the council."— B. D. Hahn. 



IV. 

WAS THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS A 

MYTH? 

The words of Paul ring true. They are the epit- 
ome of the unanimous apostolic witness to this 
great central truth of Christianity, the resurrec- 
tion of Christ. Sane men do not question the well 
established historical fact of the crucifixion of 
Christ. The fact of the resurrection is equally in- 
dubitable. These two historical events are the 
giant arches on which the temple of Christianity 
is reared. If one is looking for the essence of the 
Christian religion, as exhibited in the New Testa- 
ment, he need not search longer for the Holy 
Grail, but simply pause and drink deep from this 
golden chalice. ''Nothing that Jesus was or did, 
apart from the resurrection, can justify or sustain 
the religious life which we see in the New Testa- 
ment," says Denny. It is the greatest foretoken 
of immortality known among men. ' ' Only very 
ignorant persons," declares Hillis, "say any longer, 

71 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

'No one ever came back.'" Jesus came back, 
"Before Christ lived and died," says one, "the 
Tuscans made each tomb face the west, for the 
soul's sun had set never to rise. After Christ 
tombs faced the east, for the sun had disappeared 
to stand again upon the horizon clothed with un- 
troubled splendor." The sons of men with an 
infinite longing for the deathless life have at last 
found an argument that transforms the sage's bet- 
ter guesses, the analogies of nature, the instinct's 
quenchless dream and reason's "perhaps" into a 
rational certainty. 

1. Yet there are a few voices that would call 
us away from the New Testament faith and fact. 
It is sometimes perplexing to thoughtful people 
to discover this, not in the ranks of the enemy, but 
in the house of friends, and among men who are 
by no means wanting in sympathy with the life 
and teaching of Jesus Christ. To the untutored 
it is confusing, if not faith-destroying. It is the 
apotheosis of criticism when it loses its vision so 
badly as to deny the resurrection of Jesus. One 
is persuaded by the self -sufficient temerity of these 
learned men that they do not believe in the New 
Testament because they did not write it. Coming 
to the investigation of the subject with prepos- 
sessions diametrically opposed to the historical 

72 



EESUEEECTION OF JESUS A MYTH? 

facts recorded therein, they beg the question in ad- 
vance, and pronounce verdict before trying the 
case. Dogmatic in denial, no one can tell them 
anything. They have forsaken the open mind and 
closed their eyes at the gates of life. As Sojourner 
Truth said to a certain man, who, at Fanueil Hall, 
had made a fierce attack upon abolition, as she 
tapped her forehead, " Honey, I would tell you 
something, but I see you have n 't anything to carry 
it away in." Nothing can demolish their preju- 
dices except a collision with facts. Arguments 
will not avail. We must simply await the result 
of the solid impact on their minds of something 
flintier than reason. To deny the sun, however, 
does not prevent its shining, nor our enjoying its 
light, even if others turn blind eyes toward the 
glorious orb of day and discover no light. 

2. But let us be fair. Few thoughtful men 
nowadays doubt or deny the great fact of Jesus' 
resurrection, but merely the reality and historicity 
of the New Testament appearances and records of 
that fact. They make a distinction between the 
Easter faith and the Easter message. The one is 
real, the other is doubtful or mythical; the first is 
independent of the New Testament, the other is 
the legendary addendum of pious but fraudulent 
writers of fiction, who objectified the primitive 

73 



THE GEEATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

faith of the early disciples into the imaginary ap- 
pearances usually credited as truth. The great 
soul of Jesus, they say, could not be holden of 
death. If there is immortality for any one, there 
must certainly be for Him. He is but the first- 
born among many brethren. Because we all shall 
live, He liveth also. On this hypothesis, there is 
no empty tomb to be accounted for, either by a 
theft or a swoon theory. That the New Testament 
religion is dependent upon a faith in the resur- 
rection of Jesus may be admitted, but not upon 
the historical fact. ' ' Whatever may have happened 
at the grave," says Harnack ("What is Christian- 
ity?" English translation, page 162), "one thing 
is certain; this grave is the birthplace of the in- 
destructible belief that death is vanquished, that 
there is life eternal." 

How that faith was created there is no agree- 
ment. One says it was due purely to subjective 
exaltation and excitement, as the disciples medi- 
tated upon the greatness of the crucified Lord. 
But this drops the resurrection from the realm 
of the psychological into that of the pathological. 
It is, moreover, contrary to a normal reaction from 
the intense gloom, hopelessness, and depression into 
which, for three days, the disciples were plunged. 
Instead of apathy, lethargy, and spiritless despair, 

74 



BESUKKECTION OF JESUS A MYTH? 

contrary to all their expectations, within a few 
hours the disciples were lifted out of depression 
and disillusionment into exaltation, courage, en- 
during and unanimous conviction. Hallucination 
is too flimsy a foundation on which to build Chris- 
tianity. But another says that Jesus did not really 
appear, but so wrought upon the minds of the 
disciples that they thought the risen Lord really 
appeared to them. But here is a greater wonder 
than the wonder itself. It outmiracles miracle. 
It takes more credulity to believe this than faith 
to trust the records as narrating fact. Still others 
would have us believe that there were no Chris- 
tophanies to account for at all. Their mystical souls 
need no such insecure props for faith as the imper- 
fect records of the New Testament. They dwell 
in such a lofty attitude of pure communion with 
the ever-living Lord that they require no other 
proof of His resurrection. But, sad to say, it is 
not given to all Christian men to possess such clair- 
voyancy or to dwell in the seventh heaven of mys- 
ticism, so pure as to hear things it is not lawful 
for a man to trust on the basis of the historical 
records. Moreover, faith is not so independent of 
history as these superior minds would have us be- 
lieve. The faith and records of the disciples them- 
selves remain to be accounted for. If the disciples 

75 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

did not write them, who did? And how do these 
clairvoyant thinkers know so much about the rec- 
ords anyway? By "contemporaneous revelation?" 
The accounts of the resurrection are at least as 
trustworthy as the New Testament as a whole. 
Again, there is no reasonable motive for thus play- 
ing magic with the credulity of men, nor for patch- 
ing up or manufacturing ancient history to order 
after this unscrupulous fashion. What, too, shall 
be said of the supernatural collusion that could 
perpetrate and perpetuate such a crude apotheosis 
as this? It passes comprehension. 

II. The temper underlying this "superior" 
handling of the historical records of the resurrec- 
tion is not difficult to determine. It has one of 
two aspects: 

1. Your philosophical critics, immersed in a 
naturalistic and mechanical conception of the uni- 
verse, worshiping a necessitarian reign of law, as 
the only thing admissible to the modern scientific 
mind, deny the miraculous in general, and the 
miracle of the historical resurrection in particular. 
They assert, indeed, that God is immanent in His 
world, but make also a mental fetich of natural law 
as a universal necessity certain as fate, which it is 
impossible, even for the omnipotent God, to tran- 

76 



KESURRECTION OF JESUS A MYTH? 

scend. Their immanent God never has, never will, 
never can alter the observed uniformity of His acts, 
as expressed in natural forces and laws. All is nat- 
ural, and there is no supernatural. But such an im- 
potent, immanent God is no God at all ; he is like a 
mouse caught in a trap, revolving his wheel, but 
unable to escape. The Christian conception of the 
immanent God is far different. In Him we live 
and move and have our being. In this sense the 
natural is supernatural. But while a distinction 
may abide for human thinking and power between 
the natural and the miraculous (which a thousand 
years of progress in knowledge may not remove) 
for the divine mind and power one is as natural 
as the other. In this sense is the supernatural 
natural, and the natural supernatural. To live 
again is not so wonderful. That we live at all is 
the great miracle. A miracle is not a violation of 
the natural order. God does not violate His own 
acts. No one but Hume and his belated disciples 
would accept such a definition of the miraculous. 
That is simply a man of straw, set up for brave 
(?) men to thump and pummel and burn. That 
God would not and does not often depart from His 
uniform operation or mode of self-expression in 
natural law goes without saying. To do so often 
would lead to madness, and no man could be cer- 

77 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

tain of what is now the most commonplace cer- 
tainty. No man knows enough to deny the possi- 
bility of the miraculous. This arrogates slightly 
too much knowledge to isolated thinkers living 
nineteen hundred years after the fact. Perhaps 
they have had some special "contemporaneous 
revelation ' ' from heaven ? We call for the creden- 
tials, however. Until then we shall run the risk 
of intellectual naivete and accept the witness of 
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and the writer 
of the Hebrews, to say nothing of the countless 
ages of Christian believers since. "Neither nat- 
ural science nor history can deny the resurrec- 
tion except by claiming for themselves to exhaust 
the truth and reality of the universe — a claim 
the untruth of which is self-evident." (Denny, 
"Jesus and the Gospel," page 115.) 

2. Your historical critic, using his little "sci- 
ence, falsely so called," as the measuring rod of 
the universe, arrives at a similar conclusion with 
the naturalistic philosopher, but by another route. 
To get back to Jesus is not the unimportant thing 
your philosopher would have you believe. The 
important concern is to get back to the real 
Jesus, not that distended, enlarged figure re- 
touched by some imaginative religious novelist, 
who added his own ideal glorification to the real 

78 



KESURBECTION OF JESUS A MYTH? 

portrait. What we find, says our wise critic, in the 
historical Jesus is not the author or object of the 
Christian faith, but just a man like ourselves, but 
ideal in character and noble in soul — "a pious, 
humble, good man, who called others to trust the 
Father as he trusted Him, and to be children of 
God like him." Of course the miracles must go, 
including the historical resurrection of Jesus. 
The Christian religion has been a mistake, a de- 
lusion from the beginning, valuable for the com- 
mon herd, perhaps, but incredible to this oversoul. 
Getting beneath the rubbish of primitive tradition 
and faith your historical archaeologist discovers the 
real Jesus. The Christian Church and the earliest 
disciples, from time immemorial, have been the 
victims of a gigantic though pious fraud. 
wondrous art, thrice exalted, that could conceive 
and achieve an age-long hoax like this! But he, 
the critic, has just found it out. His contempo- 
raneous revelation has just discovered it to him! 
But what have we left? Nothing but a wraith of 
Jesus, not an historical person; inspiring neither 
faith nor love, only piety. Nor will it attract men 
sufficiently to bring them to the Cross for forgive- 
ness and salvation. This is a priori dogmatism, 
as prejudiced as that of the Spanish inquisitors. 
Only very courageous souls would dare espouse it. 

79 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

But enough! The world simply does not credit 
all this. This theory, if accepted, would be a 
" stupendous impeachment of Providence." But 
we need have no fear it will ever do much damage. 
Truth is, as Professor Denny says, "it is a mere 
failure in intelligence — a sort of cowardice, to 
speak plainly — which makes people nervous about 
Jesus and the Gospels." 

III. Constructive Arguments for the Histo- 
ricity and Reality of the Resurrection of 
Jesus are not Wanting. 

1. If there has been no resurrection, there 
would have been no New Testament at all. The 
Christian religion, inspired by a deathless faith in 
a living Lord, was preached for years before ever 
one word of the New Testament traditions was 
committed to writing. No faith in a risen Lord, 
no New Testament ! 

2. The world would, moreover, never have had 
a Christian religion had the Lord not risen from 
the dead. "This is the original wonder, that a 
dead cause came to life when the friends of that 
cause became convinced that the Master of it was 
not dead, but alive. Christianity began in the con- 
sciousness of the Lord who had triumphed over 
death, and who from the unseen inspired and 

80 



RESURRECTION OF JESUS A MYTH? 

guided His apostles and disciples." (Gordon). 
"The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is 
the existence of the Church in that extraordinary- 
spiritual vitality which confronts us in the New 
Testament." (Denny, page 107.) Had Jesus of 
Nazareth not risen from the dead He might have 
been known, as was Socrates of Athens, for His 
wise sayings and His blameless life, but never as 
the Founder of the Christian religion and never as 
the Savior of men. 

3. Another great proof of the reality of the 
resurrection, is the revolution which was wrought, 
within three days, in the spirits and minds of the 
scattered disciples. The lost cause seemed to them 
dead beyond possibility of restoration. Despair 
settled down upon them, as their hopes were 
blasted. But within three days all is transformed. 
Instead of a dead Master they have a living Lord. 
"For the original disciples of Jesus, His resur- 
rection changed the entire aspect of the world. 
Henceforth it lay as in an everlasting sunset, 
traveling in the glow and fire of His sublime 
memory. Never again could the disciples look upon 
the world as it had appeared to them before they 
knew Jesus; never again could they see a Christ- 
less humanity; they lived, suffered, achieved, and 
died in the divine dream into which Jesus had 
6 81 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

lifted mankind; they beheld the world eternally 
transfigured in His risen and victorious life." 
(Gordon, "Religion and Miracle," page 115). The 
Easter faith and the Easter message are indissol- 
ubly intertwined. If one dies, both perish. 

4. If there had been no resurrection, the 
Christian hope of immortality would never have 
been born. Our faith in the future life would 
have been little more than a ' ■ perhaps, " a * ' guess, ' ' 
an instinctive yearning, an unanswered challenge 
of the divine "veracity." Jesus, by His resurrec- 
tion, brought life and immortality to light. All 
other arguments are open to serious doubt without 
this great demonstration. They have always ex- 
isted and have been seen by pagan writers, like 
Cicero and Socrates and Plato, but were never 
sufficiently convincing to lift men out of their pro- 
found hopelessness and despair. 

"If a man die, shall he live again?" was never 
satisfactorily answered until Jesus smote the tomb 
itself with death and proclaimed Himself victor 
over the last enemy of mankind. It is a pleasing 

but illogical inconsistency for those who deny the 

i 

miraculous to cling so tenaciously to the hope of 
immortality, the greatest miracle of all. Far be it 
from me, by rude hand, to shatter that hope, but 
a future life is a thing undemonstrable by pure 

82 



KESURKECTION OF JESUS A MYTH? 

science, and is as much a violation of the natural 
order as are the New Testament miracles. But, 
even without Jesus, it is a pleasing dream, and we 
would not be the first to wake men from it. With- 
out a risen Lord, man is but 

"An infant crying in the night, 
An infant crying for the light, 
And with no language but a cry." 

"In the Christian religion one interpretation 
has been put upon them (the appearances of the 
risen Lord). They have been regarded as his- 
torical and independent guarantees of a transcend- 
ent world, a life beyond death, the sovereignty 
of Jesus, the reconcilation of the sinful world and 
G-od." (Denny, page 107.) And so all men have 
become possessors of the Christian faith in the 
risen Lord, even those least entitled to it. The 
logical inference is that He is risen in truth. 

IV. The Records Themselves. 
1. The records of the resurrection of Jesus are 
among the very earliest Christian literature of any 
kind. The first written account, which rings true 
and bears every mark of genuineness, is set down 
in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians by Paul, 
some twenty or twenty-five years after the fact. 
Paul was converted and became perfectly familiar 

83 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

with the Christian tradition within a year or so 
after the crucifixion of Jesus. Hence these ac- 
cepted data were believed and preached by the dis- 
ciples from the day of Pentecost on, and were 
never questioned by them or varied in essentials. 
While there may be minor discrepancies and vari- 
ations in the accounts of the resurrection as re- 
corded by the reports in the Gospels and Epistles, 
they all, with unanimity and without variation, 
agree on the great fact itself of the resurrection of 
Jesus. This fact was as real to them as the cruci- 
fixion itself. It transpired not subjectively in 
their minds, nor was it borne in upon them psy- 
chologically by the ideal glorification of their Hero, 
nor by the conviction that His noble soul could not 
be holden of death, but it arose spontaneously be- 
cause they had "seen the Lord." It did not come 
at different times to one and another, as you would 
expect a purely psychological phenomenon to tran- 
spire. But they all knew simultaneously, the third 
day, that He had risen. Moreover, the witness is 
minute and particular, and was never successfully 
challenged in their daj^, nor has it been in any 
other. Paul, who is not usually concerned with the 
historical facts of Jesus' life, dwells on the resur- 
rection, and names in order a partial list of those 
who saw the Lord : "He was seen of Cephas, then 

84 



EESUERECTION OF JESUS A MYTH? 

of the twelve ; after that He was seen of above five 
hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater 
part remain unto this present, but some are fallen 
asleep. After that He was seen of James, then of 
all the apostles.' ' The word "seen" here conveys 
the idea not of "vision," but of the suddenness of 
the appearance, startling and compelling. He does 
not assume that these were the only ones who saw 
the risen Lord, but gives this full list as a convinc- 
ing witness of the great fact. "About the fact, 
the reality of the risen Lord, ' ' says Gordon, ' l there 
is, however, ultimately no doubt. All the apostles, 
including the noble skeptic of their band, Thomas, 
all the time and without the shadow of a doubt, so 
far as we know, from that date to the end of their 
lives, believed that Jesus was alive and ruling their 
hearts out of the unseen. ' ' ( G. A. Gordon 's sermon 
on "The Great Assurance," page 10.) This resur- 
rection of Jesus was not a reanimation of the dead 
body of the Lord, subject to the same conditions 
and limitations as before, subject also to another 
death, but it was a glorified body which had some- 
how been transformed by the power of the Lord 
God Omnipotent. "Glory and power" are the 
words with which Paul most frequently character- 
ized it, whose vocabulary lacked the one word* 
omnipotent which we possess. No longer was it the 

85 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

body of His humiliation, but a transcendent and 
glorified Being who stood in their presence and 
turned their souls from gloom and sadness into 
exultation and victory. 

2. Some critics have magnified certain dis- 
crepancies and puzzles which they allege to exist 
in the various accounts of the resurrection, as given 
by the four evangelists and by Paul and the Acts. 
It is useless to deny that some puzzles do exist. 
No one has been able to construct a complete 
chronology of all the recorded appearances. The 
places of Jesus' appearing are variously recorded 
by the evangelists. But doubtless none of them 
meant to record more than one or more typical 
scenes of the appearances of the risen Lord, and to 
set down His last great commands. Some are 
troubled about what they term the "progressive 
materialization of the appearances/ ' as if it were 
intentionally produced by the sacreft writer to sup- 
port some particular conception of the nature of 
the appearance. But there is no trace of motive 
for such fiction in the New Testament itself. The 
truth and the important considerations are that 
all are unequivocal and unanimous about the great 
central fact. Variations in detail in the accounts 
of this fact are not only permissible, but expected. 
Their number and character have been grossly 

86 



EESUREECTION OF JESUS A MYTH? 

exaggerated. Fewer differences will be found even 
by critical and microscopic investigation than in 
the accounts printed the next day by eyewitnesses 
of the martyrdom of Abraham Lincoln. 

V. Moral Considerations Which Reinforce 

the Historical are Well Summarized 

by Professor Denny. 

1. In the first place, it is the resurrection of 
Jesus. There is moral congruity here. If it had 
been claimed of Herod it would have been tabooed. 
It was at one time claimed of the unspeakable Nero, 
but always discredited. But of that radiant, lovely 
Divine Personality it seemed the most natural 
thing in the world. He could not be "holden of 
death." (Acts 2:24.) 2. In the second place, 
the disciples did not preach the resurrection of 
Jesus merely as historical fact, but they preached 
the gospel of the resurrection — the fact and its 
interpretation inseparably one. It constituted a 
supreme appeal and motive force in the propaga- 
tion of the new faith. It was a truth to be morally 
and spiritually as well as historically discerned. 
' ' The moral significance of the resurrection flooded 
like sunlight the ministry of the Apostolic Church, 
as it became the burden of their preaching, ex- 
tended G-odward and manward, illuminating the 

87 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

mystery of the Incarnation, exhibiting the majesty 
of human life." (Pages 184, 185, Hall's "The 
Universal Elements of the Christian Religion.") 
3. In the third place, men everywhere believed the 
resurrection as a fact, because they saw it ope- 
rate as a moral power. The transformation of 
those depressed and sinful fishermen, the birth 
and progress of the Christian Church, the con- 
version of the myriad-minded Paul, all are moral 
proofs of the fact upon which they are based. 4. 
The reality of the living Lord is now open to ex- 
perimental certainty to the trustful soul, and in 
the last analysis implies Christian experience in 
all its forms. No risen Lord, no Christian expe- 
rience. And this is an experimental demonstration 
which any man now living may test for himself. 
"Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of 
the world, " is no puzzle to the Christian heart, liv- 
ing in simple and trustful communion with Him. 
In fine, the testimony of the apostles and the 
Church to the resurrection of Jesus is invulner- 
able. We know the worst that can be said by the 
skeptic. He has but a flimsy and unsubstantial 
foundation for his unbelief. All the mysteries 
about the fact have not been cleared up. Much 
remains to us unknown. This does not discredit it. 
"There is enough mystery in a handful of moss" 

88 



RESURRECTION OF JESUS A MYTH? 

to baffle a scientist for a lifetime. But one may 
rest his personal salvation, his eternal destiny, and 
his hope of immortality upon that great transcend- 
ent declaration, " Because I live, ye shall live also." 

" Lift your glad voices in triumph on high, 
For Jesus hath risen, and man shall not die ; 
Vain were the terrors that gathered around Him, 
And short the dominion of death and the grave ; 
He burst from the fetters of darkness that bound 

Him, 
Eesplendent in glory, to live and to save: 
Loud was the chorus of angels on high, — 
The Savior hath risen, and man shall not die." 



89 



Is There a Heaven and Hell? 



"And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the 
righteous into life eternal."— Matt. 25 : 46. 

" It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment." — 
Epistle to the Hebrews. 

" I saw a man sit by a corpse ; 
Hell 's in the murderer 's breast : remorse ! 

Thus clamored his mind to his mind : 
Not fleshly dole is the sinner's goal, 

Hell 's not below, nor yet above, 
'T is fixed in the ever-damned soul — 
' Fixed ' quoth Love. ' ' 

— Lanier. 

"Who could guess that the mind has so many doors leading directly 
into hell?"— A woman to Dr. Worcester. 

" A spark of the eternal God : 

And to what end ? How yield I back 
The trust for high uses given ? 

Heaven 's light hath but revealed a track 
Whereby to crawl away from heaven. ' ' 

— Lowell. 

' We are going to be through this life before very long. The longest life 
is short when it is over ; any time is short when it is done. The gates will 
swing to behind some of us soon, but behind all of us before long. And 
then the important thing will be . . . not what men thought of us, but 
what He thought of us, and whether we were built into His Kingdom. And 
if, at the end of it all, we emerge from life's work and discipline crowned 
souls, at home anywhere in God 's universe, life will be a success." — Among 
last public utterances of Dr. Bowne. 

" This body is my house— it is not I ; 
Herein I sojourn till, in some far sky, 
I lease a fairer dwelling, built to last 
Till all the carpentry of the sky is past. . . . 
When thou, clay cottage, fallest, I '11 immerse 
My long cramped spirit in the universe. 
Through uncomputed silences of space 
I shall yearn upward to the leaning Face. . . 
This body is my house— it is not I. 
Triumphant in this faith I live, and die. " 

— Written by him a week before Frederick Lawrence Knowles was 
taken ill with his last fatal illness. 



IS THERE A HEAVEN AND HELL? 

Some declare that "heaven is a dream." If so, 
do not wake me from my dream. Some affirm that 
"hell is a myth." Ceasing to believe in a thing, 
however, does not abolish it. Some assert that 
"there is a heaven, but no hell." But the proofs 
for one are about as strong as for the other. 
The wish may be father to the thought. Some say 
"there is a hell, but no heaven." But that is be- 
cause they are in hell now, perhaps, in the bitter- 
ness of sin and pessimism, and have lost the glor- 
ious prospect of paradise. Let us consider what is 
the truth in this matter, for our object is first to dis- 
cover the truth, let it lead us where it will, whether 
to reject outgrown conceptions or to champion new, 
and having found it, to put it into concrete life 
and conduct. 

There are undoubtedly heavens and hells on 
earth. Wherever holiness, love, and obedience to 

93 



THE GBEATEST THINGS IN EELIGION. 

divine law reigns, there is heaven. Wherever dis- 
obedience and hatred rule they beget wretched- 
ness, remorse and retribution, which is hell. Sal- 
vation nowadays means deliverance from sin, pres- 
ent sin, let the future be what it may, not from 
some future hell, sealed by a paid-up insurance 
policy on some future heaven. "Christ is not a 
celestial fire-escape," He is the Savior from sin. 
Is there a future heaven and hell? Logically 
we should have first to demonstrate to faith that 
there is a life beyond the grave; that death does 
not end all. We pass that now, however, and for 
the time being assume immortality as the hope 
and faith of all. Some students in Germany we 
met not only disbelieved in any future life, but 
even doubted the existence of God and the soul. 
Death was pushing off into black nothingness. 
Identity, self-consciousness, mortal life, thinking, 
and feeling were swallowed up in the illimitable 
void. Souls are cast by the grim enemy of man- 
kind to the rubbish heap. Some few men have 
been known in America to have declared that death 
was the end of everything for every man. Such 
views, however, certainly never have and never 
will win the assent of the vast majority of men, 
certainly not the Christian. Revelation promises 
it, reason infers it, science finds no fault with it, 

94 



IS THERE A HEAVEN AND HELL? 

as John Fiske showed. The argument for immor- 
tality is approved by the Scriptures, reinforced by 
evidences of analogy of the unity of consciousness, 
by instinctive faith, by an ethical view of the 
divine dealings with men, by the promises of God. 
Christ came to bring life and immortality to light. 
Materialistic notions both of heaven and hell 
are fast being abrogated by thoughtful men. 
God's opulence will doubtless provide a heaven 
that will surprise our best conceptions and surpass 
our holiest dreams. There will be surprises when 
the soul enters the home of the blessed. Those who 
thought the most about it will probably have to 
reprint many of those fanciful pictures of that 
fair world which their human imagination had 
painted in materialistic colors. Certainly the fiery 
hell of our forefathers has been abolished forever. 
Neither the theologian nor the man on the street 
believes in the existence of such a place as their 
crude imagination depicted. Yet doubtless there 
are unrevised creeds which still declare that the 
punishment of sin shall be the "most grievous tor- 
ments in soul and body without intermission in 
hell-fire forever." Jonathan Edwards taught that 
hell is like a red-hot oven in which the wicked are 
to be eternally burned for the glory of God, and 
he preached it with such awful power that men 

95 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

screamed out in terror as they listened to him. 
An old Latin schoolman taught that in hell "an 
intelligent fire burns the limbs and restores them, 
feeds on them and nourishes them." Dante's 
Divina Comedia was full of these crude literalistic 
portrayals of the doom of the damned. The fig- 
urative language of the Scripture, taken literally, 
was amended by mediaeval schoolmen and the 
horrors greatly elaborated. Ked-hot gridirons, at- 
tended by shrieking demons, cauldrons of boiling 
lead and brimstone poured on the newcomers, a 
pestilential atmosphere, laden with concentrated 
diseases, of cloven-footed and horny-headed demons 
goading and driving the victims up and down steep 
heights into the awful prisons whence issued the 
dreadful chorus of shrieks, was a part of the lurid 
description. Even that devout and brilliant 
preacher — great not because of such preaching, but 
in spite of it — Charles H. Spurgeon, solemnly de- 
clared that a sinner would be punished by fire ex- 
actly like that we have on the earth. "Thy body 
will lie asbestos-like, forever unconsumed; all thy 
veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on, thy 
limbs cracking like martyrs in the fire and yet un- 
burnt, thyself put in a vessel of hot oil, pained, 
yet coming out undestroyed ; every nerve a string on 
which the devil shall ever play his diabolical tune 

96 



IS THERE A HEAVEN AND HELL? 

of hell's unutterable lament. . . . Many of you 
will go away and laugh and call me a hell-fire par- 
son. Well, go! But you will see the hell-fire 
preacher one day in heaven, perhaps, and you your- 
selves will be cast out; and looking down thence 
with reproving glance it may be that I shall remind 
you that you heard the word and listened not to 
it." This extraordinary quotation from the great 
divine offends both because of its crude literalism 
and because of its manifestation of such a spirit in 
a Christian minister. Such shocking materialistic 
notions of hell that come to us out of the past are 
false interpretations of the figurative language of 
the Scripture, and are due to erroneous ideas of the 
vindictive wrath of the good Father above. They 
really cast aspersion upon the divine character. 
The punishment of the wicked is described severally 
in the Scriptures as "fire," "the worm that dieth 
not," and "the blackness of darkness," and yet 
none of these could coexist literally with the other. 
Neither darkness nor the worm could conceivably 
subsist where there was fire. Such a punishment, 
moreover, would have no logical relation to any sin 
of the soul and heart, nor naturally grow, as pun- 
ishment ought, out of sinful acts or conditions as 
the result of degeneration or depravity. Literal 
fire can not hurt the soul. 
7 97 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

What is the reality behind all these figurative 
portrayals? For one to deny that the righteous 
shall be rewarded with the gift of heavenly bliss, 
or that the sinful shall be punished in the future, 
is to take square issue with the teaching of Jesus, 
the whole trend of the New Testament, and the 
dictates of reason. Listen to the impressive dec- 
larations of Holy Writ: "These shall go away into 
everlasting punishment, ' ' said Jesus, "but the 
righteous unto life eternal." (Matt. 25: 46.) "The 
dead shall come forth; they that have done good, 
unto the resurrection of life, and they that have 
done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation." 
(John 5: 29.) (Of. also Rom. 2: 1-10.) "But unto 
them that are contentious and do not obey the 
truth, but obey righteousness, indignation and 
wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul 
that doeth evil." (Rom. 2:8.) The fires of remorse, 
mental anguish over a misspent life, of the compul- 
sion of a self -contemplation and self-condemnation 
filled with hopelessness and regret, of unused op- 
portunities, of eternal moral losses and impossibili- 
ties, of memories of misused talents, of enforced 
separations, of devilish hatreds and crimes, of im- 
penitent antipathy to unselfishness and the Chris- 
tian spirit, of spiritual deterioration and dissocia- 
tion from the true, the beautiful, and the good ; in 

98 



IS THEEE A HEAVEN AND HELL? 

fine, the degeneration of character and discord with 
G-od and righteousness, — these fires are far more 
terrifying and real, far more awful than any fire 
ever kindled in the imagination of the fathers. An 
outraged conscience is itself an awful punishment. 
"In a secret chest, under lock and key, Haw- 
thorne's Dimmesdale hid a bloody scourge with 
which he plied his shoulders. Fasting by day, he 
kept long vigils by night until his brain reeled 
and his strength failed. In one of those semi- 
conscious hours he saw demons beckoning to him 
to join their company. Once, when an angel band 
approached as if for convoy, the celestial beings 
started back in horror and fled, for they recognized 
his guilty secret. Saddest of all, the ghost of his 
revered mother approached, only to pass by without 
casting a single pitying look behind." 

Reaping the reward of his monstrous sins, 
George Eliot's Tito felt as if a "serpent began to 
coil about his limbs." 

Rational, scientific, and moral grounds reinforce 
the divine promises that righteousness will secure 
eternal reward, and the warning of Jesus that sin 
will eventually entail a moral accounting by the 
great Judge. 

1. The moral law, that whatsoever a man sows 
that shall he also reap, operates in all worlds. Figs 

99 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

do not grow of thistles, nor wheat of plantain; 
grapes do not spring from thorns. Neither can a 
man sow wicked deeds and reap happiness, nor un- 
godliness and reap heaven. Let a man plant the 
seeds of degeneracy, immorality, and spiritual neg- 
lect in his character, and he can but reap moral 
and spiritual death. Let him sow faith, holy liv- 
ing, and a Christ-like spirit, and the harvest will 
be everlasting bliss and peace. 

Eetribution will as surely follow sin in this 
world or another as the night the day. Divine com- 
pensation must repay all tears and sacrifice in 
Christ's name. The fruition may be delayed, but 
it will surely come. The mills of God grind slowly, 
but they grind exceeding small. Nor will men ob- 
ject or complain. It will be just. The guilty will, 
like the man without the wedding garment, be 
speechless. There is nothing to be said when the 
great Judge, who knows all, remembers all, tries 
all, and loves all, speaks. Many who hold guilty 
secrets will in the last great day gladly give them 
up and await their fate. Hawthorne, drawing a 
lesson from Dimmesdale's tragedy, declares "that 
in the last great judgment day every heart that 
holds a miserable secret will yield it up, not with 
reluctance, but with joy unutterable." Many a 
guilty man, by his own confession, was anxious to 

100 



IS THERE A HEAVEN AND HELL? 

be discovered, and goes with a light heart to meet 
his deserved and waiting punishment. 

2. The law of crystallization of character, lead- 
ing to its final fixity, indicates an eternal moral sep- 
aration of men. Character up to a given point is 
plastic and changeable. By and by it becomes fixed 
and immutable. Until that fixity occurs, the direc- 
tion the soul is moving is the determining factor. 
Slipping downward, the soul has a millstone about 
it ; struggling upward, it has heavenly wings. The 
way a soul faces is more important than the posi- 
tion in the moral scale it occupies. For a degener- 
ate character no more awful hell could be imagined 
than just being compelled to live with itself. The 
projection of character beyond the grave is the 
only reasonable expectation in a bi-world nloral 
universe ruled by God. All characters are not 
equally sinful or equally righteous in this world 
or the next, but the trend of character will deter- 
mine final destiny. Even God Almighty can not 
override the freedom of a man's moral choices. 

3. Any ethical view of God's love and justice 
demands that the righteous shall be rewarded and 
the wicked punished. If there is no distinction in 
final destiny between right and wrong, it involves 
an indictment of the moral integrity of the uni- 
verse. That there are earthly inequalities which 

101 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

must await future adjudication, is admitted by all 
familiar with life. Some injustices ought to be 
righted here and now. No one can blame men for 
discontent with the avoidable conditions that lift 
high the sinner and cast down the saint. Some in- 
equalities will be adjusted as time rolls on; but 
others can never be, in this world. The saints are 
martyred, and the wicked flourish like a great bay 
tree. It must ever be so. But He that sitteth in 
the circle of the heavens shall laugh at them. He 
seeth that their time is coming. They must give 
an account of the deeds done in the body. Sin 
leads logically to separation from the good. A sin- 
ful being would not be happy in heaven even if 
thrust in by force. Cramming heaven into a man 's 
black heart and pushing a guilty wretch into 
heaven are equally impossible. 

But what of eternal punishment ? Few will 
deny that sin will entail punishment, but some 
question the justice or probability of its eternal 
duration. 

There are several modes of dealing with this di- 
lemma : 

1. Universalism is a winsome and optimistic 
hope that does credit to the heart of every man who 
holds it. He who believes it must have unspeakable 
comfort in proclaiming it. To think of any other 

102 



IS THERE A HEAVEN AND HELL? 

possibility fills our own heart with sorrow. Cer- 
tain of the great poets have given this "larger 
hope" finest expression. Sings one: 

" O yet we trust, . . . 

That not one life shall be destroyed 
Or cast as rubbish to the void 
When God hath made the pile complete." 

But there are three decisive reasons against it. 
(1) Jesus' teaching and the whole trend of the 
New Testament (with the exception of several de- 
batable passages) unmistakably point to an irre- 
mediable doom awaiting the finally impenitent. 
Jesus' words are unmistakable. He who holds the 
"larger hope" must take flat issue with His words 
or else deny their authenticity. (2) God Himself 
can not compel a free agent to choose righteousness 
and holiness against his will. (3) It is the wit- 
ness of revelation and the observation of human 
nature that there is a point where character be- 
comes fixed and unchangeable, and that men may 
obstinately choose the evil and deliberately spurn 
proffered pardon and righteousness. I wish I 
could believe in the "larger hope," but loyalty to 
the truth will not allow me. 

2. Punishment, endless in duration, has been 
longest held by theologians as consonant with rev- 
elation and reason. Let it be remembered that, as 

103 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

long as sin abides, hell endures, anyway. No di- 
vine wizardry could put sin in heaven or heaven in 
sin. Eternal separation, deprivation, remorse, and 
retribution are but the logical and natural results 
of a sinful character. As long as sinful character 
abides, its retribution must necessarily endure. If 
that endures forever, its punishment will. There 
is an unpardonable sin, whatever it may be. Some 
see in the abode of the lost a kind of asylum, a mad- 
house provided by Omnipotent Love (nothing so 
well defines sin as madness). This is provided by 
Infinite Love so that the madness of its inmates 
will not work further havoc on themselves or the 
universe. It also provides protection from con- 
tamination and discord for those who dwell among 
the blessed. 

The idea of punishment involves, practically, a 
variety of method, varying according to time and 
place and nature of the delinquency, viz. : separa- 
tion, deprivation, pain, remorseful memory, and de- 
struction. Some men, for crimes committed, are, 
by the operation of our present laws, cast into 
prison, some are deprived of certain rights of citi- 
zenship, some separated from the fellowship of 
their associates, some are executed outright. Pos- 
sibly all of these modes of punishment, transferred 
to the moral plane, may be involved in the future 

104 



IS THERE A HEAVEN AND HELL! 

punishment of the wicked. The disuse or abuse of 
moral or spiritual faculties atrophies them. By 
and by continual atrophy of all moral faculties 
leads to spiritual death. 

3. A third new theory has latterly been cham- 
pioned by many devout and thoughtful men, viz.: 
conditional immortality and annihilation of the 
finally impenitent. They declare that the Scrip- 
tures do not teach unconditional immortality, quite 
the contrary, in fact; that the figure of fire used 
therein, as the instrument of punishment is, as 
customarily, a figure denoting consumption rather 
than pain; that all men are capable of survival in 
their spiritual nature, but not all will survive. 
Men who do not possess the sanctifying, renewing, 
immortal, spiritual life must perish at death or at 
some other time. Immortality is the special gift 
of those who are united to Christ by faith. Those 
who lack this, at last simply cease to be. Neither 
the Scriptures nor Jesus' own words forbid this 
view. A permissible interpretation of eternal is not 
infinite duration of time, but "irrepealable doom;" 
of fire, is that it will consume rather than cause 
endless suffering. Punishment is eternal; that is, 
there is no repeal from it, as when a soul, unfit to 
companion with God, ceases to be. It is the sur- 
vival of the spiritually fit. A soul dwells with 

105 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

God and is in heaven because it is fit to be. The 
unfit simply have the breath of spiritual life with- 
drawn. This view seems to be gaining ground 
among American thinkers. It leaves no suspicion 
of an eternal discord in the moral universe when 
''He shall subdue all things Himself." Even 
some who hold the former views of the final doom 
of the wicked see little objection to this. "If, how- 
ever," says Dr. Charles A. Dickinson, "a man 
should tell me that in the far-off asons of eternity 
the vast asylum of the lost shall be depopulated, 
because the madness of sin has spent itself and its 
victims have dropped away into eternal uncon- 
sciousness, which is 'the blackness of death' and the 
' second death,' I should be more willing to agree 
with him, for I am more and more convinced that 
the final end of sin is death, and that life and im- 
mortality are the gift of God through Jesus Christ 
our Lord." 

But whatever may be the final state of the 
wicked and the just, we may be certain of two 
things : ( 1 ) The final judgment of the great Judge 
will be absolutely just. It will give every one the 
fullest opportunity to attain the ideal of his cre- 
ation as conceived and desired by God. No doubt 
God will so order circumstances, will so reveal Him- 
self, will so direct the persuasion of the Spirit as 

106 



IS THERE A HEAVEN AND HELL? 

to bring every man to holiness and heaven if it 
can be done without crushing his freedom. No hu- 
man being will be given over to suffer endless loss 
or pain while God can see a possibility of his sal- 
vation. 

(2) Now is the accepted time of choosing, now 
is the day of salvation. There is danger and death 
in delay. We may not boast of to-morrow. "It is 
appointed unto men once to die, and after that the 
judgment." An acceptance of Christ as the only 
Savior of men, and faith in Him as Master, must be 
no formal matter ! It must be vital. It must lead 
to the transformation of character and the regula- 
tion of conduct in accordance with Christ 's glorious 
mastery. ' ' Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, 
Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of heaven; but 
he that doeth the will of My Father which is in 
heaven." Dying, the great Moody said: "Earth 
recedes; heaven opens before me. It is no dream. 
It is beautiful. It is like a trance. If this is death, 
it is sweet. There is no valley here. God is calling 
me, and I must go." 



107 



Is Protestantism Passing? 



" Christ is the Head of the Church and He is the Savior of the body. "— 
Ephesians 5 : 23. 

" No one can command or ought to command the soul except God, who 
alone can show it the way to heaven. It is futile and impossible to com- 
mand, or by force to compel, any man's belief. Heresy is a spiritual 
thing, which no iron can hew down, no fire burn, no water drown. . . . 
Whenever the temporal power presumes to legislate for the soul, it en- 
croaches. ' ' — Luther. 

" Like every good teacher, authority should labor to render itself use- 
less. ' ' — Sabatier. 

"There has always been a struggle between the true Christian spirit 
and that ponderous inheritance of the past which, however, has never been 
quite able to overpower it. It has at last triumphantly shaken off the in- 
cubus, and to it the future is promised. But now it is like the captive bird 
which sees its cage falling to pieces around it. It has long been imprisoned, 
but now it is singing over the fragments, conscious of its wings and its 
liberty to use them. ' '—Sabatier. 

" The Church threatens the world with the Presbyterian finger, and the 
Methodist finger, and with the Congregational finger, and with the Baptist 
finger, and with the Episcopalian thumb, and the devil is not hurt. We 
need to have the hand doubled up into a solid fist, and then the evil about 
us will feel it. " — Anon. 

" I desire a league offensive and defensive with every soldier of Jesus 
Christ. "—John Wesley. 



VI 

IS PEOTBSTANTISM PASSING? 

Protestantism has a twofold significance: first, 
that combination of denominations which were ar- 
rayed in historical protest against the Church of 
Kome; second, that complex of forces, both con- 
structive and destructive, which was awakened in 
the intellectual, moral, and religious revolution of 
the Reformation, and still abides, albeit in modified 
and higher form. The former is institutional, vari- 
ous in form and expression, changing from time to 
time ; the latter is vital and imperishable, because it 
has won the emancipation of the human spirit, from 
which it can never revert to the slavery of the past. 
Some Protestant denominations may die, perchance 
with good reason, while Protestantism moves tri- 
umphantly forward. Too, the divided and disin- 
tegrated fashion of historical Protestantism may be 
externally fused into a more compact body by fed- 
eration or union, without essentially modifying its 

111 



THE GBEATEST THINGS IN BELIGION. 

constructive program or surrendering the vital 
spiritual conquests it has forever won for the 
human race. 

I. Is Protestantism Passing? 

Discussions of the weaknesses of both Catholi- 
cism and Protestantism, as well as the well-known 
facts of the large influx of Catholic communicants 
into America through the gates of immigration; 
the growing spirit of fraternity and co-operation 
among Protestant Churches ; the not infrequent co- 
alitions or overtures of union, presaging the realiza- 
tion of the dream of a union of all Protestantism, 
in spirit and form, if not in uniformity of worship 
and creed ; the rise of Modernism in the very bosom 
of the Church of Rome, — have combined to awaken 
extraordinary interest in the question, "Is Protes- 
tantism passing?" 

To answer this inquiry we would go deeper than 
the statistical tables, though they are sufficiently 
illuminating. Last year (1909) Protestantism 
made a net gain in communicants of nearly half a 
million (480,991), as compared with a Roman Cath- 
olic gain of 227,000, notwithstanding the fact that 
the immense tide of immigration (averaging nearly 
a million a year for a decade) has swept in from 
countries where Romanism is predominant. This 

112 



IS PROTESTANTISM PASSING? 

scarcely justifies a cry of alarm. America has won- 
derful powers of assimilation and transformation. 
Like a huge mint it swallows this human bullion, 
only to change it into coin of gold, with the stamp 
of Americanism upon it. Its capacity has in the 
past been severely tested, but it has never yet 
failed. Every one of the 150 Protestant denomina- 
tions, with the exception of seven, show an increase 
of membership aggregating a very substantial gain 
as a whole. Inspecting those few which chronicle 
a decrease, some obvious causes suffice to explain it. 
(1) Disillusionment, due to the return of common 
sense to the adherents. (2) The failure to keep 
abreast of the times either in doctrines or customs. 
(3) An over-emphasis of non-essentials. (4) A dis- 
counting of the fundamentals of Christianity. 
There is no cause for panic, therefore, in a con- 
sideration of the statistical tables. 

But, perhaps, some one rightly observes that 
this is a transitional period; that old creeds and 
outgrown conceptions of truth, like moth-eaten gar- 
ments, have lost their acceptability ; that an archaic 
and scholastic theology is being tried in the fires 
of reason and service, only to be found wanting; 
that Modernism, within both the Church of Rome 
and the Church of the Reformers, is rising in our 
skies, and one is unable as yet to discover whether 
8 113 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

it be a star of hope and promise, or a cloud of storm 
and stress. 

" New occasions teach new duties ; 
Time makes ancient good uncouth. 
They must upward still and onward, 
Who would keep abreast of truth." 

Right ! 

But every age is transitional. It was as true 
of Augustine's day and Luther's and Wesley's as 
ours. There never was a generation when, through 
the growth of knowledge and the expansion of the 
Christian spirit, the truth so jealously guarded in 
moldy parchments was not passing away. A cer- 
tain Modernism was as characteristic of John Huss 
and Savonarola as it is of Father Tyrell or Abbe 
Loisy or the priests who in the utmost boldness 
declared to the Vatican their brave hopes in ' ' What 
We Want." That Protestantism is just now un- 
dergoing a transition characteristic of our age, does 
not excite astonishment. If it were dead, it would 
not change. Our only concern should be that its 
transformation be in the direction of purification 
and perfection. Is it passing, let it be on to greater 
glory. 

The grand achievements of Protestantism, the 
spiritual liberation of the individual man, the abo- 
lition of a mode of salvation based on empty works 

114 



IS PEOTESTANTISM PASSING? 

instead of a living faith, the acknowledgment of 
the right to worship God according to the dictates 
of one's own conscience, — will never be lost, what- 
ever external forms, institutions, or unities may 
evolve in the future. Never again can the Bible 
become a book closed to the masses; never again 
will a religious excrescence or human invention be 
allowed to obscure the fair face of Christ and the 
cross; never again will the intolerance of former 
times, of which we have observed a recrudescence 
in the recent affront given by the Vatican in Rome 
to two of the most highly honored representative 
Americans, be tolerated with complacence by broad- 
minded men, whether Protestant or Catholic. The 
emancipated do not willingly reassume the collars 
and chains of a former serfdom. The spirit of re- 
ligious liberty begotten in the Reformation is death- 
less. But Protestantism will not be the last to 
bury the bloody shirt, nor the first to exhibit that 
temper of intolerance which they so much deplore. 
But, where freedom of thought is asserted, every 
man's opinions must be dispassionately examined 
in the crucible of reason and tried in the test-tube 
of experience whether they be true. They must 
stand, not by the compulsion of faith, nor the dic- 
tation of an infallible earthly authority, but by 
their inherent worth and reasonableness. But lib- 

115 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

erty is not license. Intellectual freedom is not in- 
tellectual anarchy. To abolish all authority, even 
that of God Himself, is the deathblow of truth and 
righteousness. The battle of religious liberty has 
been fought and won. The next great lesson for 
our generation to learn is that of wisdom and self- 
control. This each man must learn for himself, 
either under the kind hand of faith or the stern 
ferule of necessity. Some men never succeed in 
the attempt. But it is to be remembered that at 
best the process is perilous, and perchance painful. 

II. Neo-Protestantism. 

Our day is witnessing the rise of a Neo-Protes- 
tantism within the bounds of the Roman Church 
itself — "Modernism," so-called. Even if one 
feared the decline of Protestantism in its historical 
form, he could not fail to observe that the Vatican 
is being stirred as it has not been in a long time, 
by the rise of this diverse but critical school of 
independent thinkers within its own fold. Unlike 
Luther, they refuse to withdraw from the Church 
or be made apostates, ' ' hoping to purify the Church 
from within." The Vatican does not quite know 
what to do with Modernism, which it regards as 
the "synthesis of all heresies." She has begun 
by chopping off a few ecclesiastical heads and in- 

116 



IS PROTESTANTISM PASSING? 

terdicting some books. For the sake of outward 
peace the ecclesiastical sinners have "yielded to 
external authority only that they may in time com- 
pel it to become subject to reason/ ' They have by 
the Pope's request given up mortar-board and 
frock, but they continue to think, to write and to 
print books, and even present their claims to Pope 
Pius himself in an appeal entitled, "What We 
Want. ' ' The Pope strikes hard at Modernism and, 
let us allow, may succeed in repressing it for the 
time by Syllabus and Encyclical, in which innu- 
merable errors are pointed out, the process remind- 
ing one of the Spaniard Stunica, who professed to 
find sixty thousand heresies in the writings of Eras- 
mus. Modernists do inveigh against some of the 
archaic dogmas of the Church. Its real authority, 
they claim, is not that of an infallible Pope, but 
"the collective conscience' ' of the members of the 
Church, and they intend to remain within the fold 
to help mold that conscience for the future. They 
ally themselves with the historical critical scholar- 
ship of the times, affirming that the symbolic pre- 
sentation of the eternal truth is ever changing, ever 
coming to new expression and interpretation as 
knowledge grows. Revelation, they assert, is to the- 
ology what the stars are to astronomy or flowers to 
botany. The stars endure forever. They shone for 

117 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

Abraham on the field of Mamre, and the Babyloni- 
ans by the banks of the Euphrates, as they do 
now for Pickering in America. But modern astron- 
omy is as different from the ancient astrology as 
day and night. Lilies, too, bloomed the same at 
the feet of Jesus as they do now on the Judean 
hills ; but the science of botany — namely, our knowl- 
edge of flowers — is a modern discipline. 

The Modernist's task is a double one, they as- 
sert: to deny the Roman Caesarism, and to affirm 
true Catholicism. As an indication of the wide- 
spread demand for this, they urge the observed de- 
cay of faith among Eomanists. (This is not an il- 
lusion. Bishop Frank M. Bristol reports that in 
the University of Buenos Ayres, with its thousands 
of students from the best families of the republic, 
in a country where Roman Catholicism is dominant, 
there are not more than ten who have any religion 
whatsoever. ) That multitudes of the people are for- 
saking the Church (note the adoption of modern, 
evangelistic methods employed by the Paulist Fa- 
thers in the missions to stem this movement as 
well as to convert non-Catholics). "What Italy 
lacks/' says Don Romolo Murri, a Modernist, "is 
moral energy. A bad stench, as of something de- 
cayed, oozes from all the pores of her political life. 
The cause of it lies in the lack of real religion. 

118 



IS PROTESTANTISM PASSING! 

The principal cause of it belongs to those priests 
who represent reaction." Almost thou peruadest 
us to be Modernists, Don Romolo ! 

Mark you, we do not here discuss the merits or 
demerits of Modernism. It represents, however, a 
trend within Rome itself which is nothing short of 
Protestant in spirit. Its adherents comprise all 
schools of thought, from conservative to ultra-radi- 
cal. Some of the Modernists outprotest Protestant- 
ism. Doubtless the Vatican is right in declaring 
that the criticisms of some shake not merely the 
foundations of the Church, but the fundamentals 
of Christianity. We certainly agree with the Pope 
in condemning the ultra-radical Modernist who 
separates the Jesus of history from the Christ of 
faith, leaving the former in foggy uncertainty and 
the latter in ideal glorification. But our present 
purpose is merely to indicate that a new Protes- 
tantism has arisen within Romanism; reason — the 
flaming spirit of Protestantism is unquenchable. 
Its day is not done. The mission of Protestantism 
is not yet fulfilled so that it can die. Not only 
must it stand for the spiritual emancipation of man 
everywhere on this round globe, but, having 
achieved that by missionary and evangelizing con- 
quest, it must solve the great problems of the ap- 
plication of the principles of Christian ethics to 

119 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

modern industrial, economic, and social life, and 
meet the social crisis upon us in the spirit and 
mind of the Master. Our task is by no means ac- 
complished. 

III. The Next Step. 

But not a few fix their gaze upon the weak- 
nesses and failures of Protestantism as a sign of 
its passing. Newman Smyth points them out in 
his able and brilliant fashion. Many of the faults 
cited, however, are characteristic of both Romanism 
and Protestantism, and not a few reside in Catholi- 
cism alone. The list can be made more or less ex- 
tensive, according to one's temper and insight into 
the passing pageant of current religious forces and 
tendencies. It is charged that there is a decay of 
authority in family and Church life, a lack of 
thorough and adequate religious education, an all 
too prevalent separation of religion and life, an 
escape of social and political factors from the di- 
rect influences of the Church as Churches; a too 
frequent loss of moral leadership, leading nega- 
tively to the encouragement of socialism. ' ' A pop- 
ulace vehement for social justice and weary of 
charity imagines it sees in the Churches a religion 
which has come down from the cross to save itself, 
and hence is powerless to save others.' 5 

120 



IS PROTESTANTISM PASSING? 

But the most serious indictment against present- 
day Protestantism is its endless divisions into de- 
nominations and sects. Many of these are founded 
upon non-essentials, upon divergences of mental 
temper or spiritual disposition, or upon some his- 
torical controversy that has now lost all religious 
significance. It is really a great scandal that there 
should be 150 different Protestant denominations 
in the United States, including nineteen bodies of 
Methodists, fifteen of Baptists, twenty-four of Lu- 
therans, and twelve of Presbyterian. Who can se- 
riously defend so great a division of forces and 
forms as needed to promote the cause of Chris- 
tianity? Undoubtedly there was historical ex- 
planation, if not justification, for most of them. 
Friendly rivalry, too, promotes progress. Diver- 
gences of temperament, liturgy, orders, mode of 
Church government and of doctrine and discipline 
are thus provided for. A forced uniformity in 
these particulars would lead to a new disruption. 
But both laymen and ministers are dreaming of a 
day when the number of denominations shall be di- 
minished, when those that remain shall be welded 
more closely together in spirit, in fraternal rela- 
tions, and federated co-operation. 

The divergences among the evangelical Churches 
have been largely based on over-emphasis of non- 
121 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

essentials or upon matters of secondary importance. 
They ought never to surrender the faith which they 
believe to be the essence of historical Christianity; 
but is it of first or divisive importance that one 
Church should sprinkle with much water and 
another with little? whether one prays printed 
prayers or extemporizes? whether ministers be 
dressed in gown or broadcloth? whether worship 
be on the first day or the seventh? whether one 
forbids questionable amusements or puts that on 
the enlightened Christian conscience? whether one 
be converted at an altar or decides that great mat- 
ter at his home? whether ministers are appointed 
by cabinet or committee ? These are relatively non- 
essential. 

But it does matter tremendously what one's at- 
titude is toward the Lord Jesus Christ. This is 
absolutely essential. Unless there be love and loy- 
alty and faith in Him, there can be no real unity, 
however uniform the externals may be. This is the 
one great focal point around which the forces of 
evangelical Protestantism may rally. He is the 
Lodestone of the ages, drawing all hearts that love 
Him into fraternal unity. "I, if I be lifted up, 
will draw all men unto Me," were Jesus' own 
words. Men have been lifting up other things, and 
Christianity has lost its power and glory. "We 

122 



IS PEOTESTANTISM PASSING? 

have come to see," says Dr. Borden P. Bowne, 
"that if we will not listen to Jesus Christ in His 
revelation of the Father, it is not worth while to 
listen to any one else. He is the only one who has 
brought a gospel worth hearing and, we may be 
sure, the only one who has brought a gospel that 
can move the hearts of men. It stands fast as the 
plainest indication and demonstration of long ex- 
perience that it is only the gospel of the Son of 
God that will long move the hearts and sway the 
minds of men." 

Prof. James Denny proposes this simple creed 
as an absolute essential to the unity of Christen- 
dom: "I believe in God, through Jesus Christ His 
only Son, our Lord and Savior." This confession 
implies two things at least: (1) "That the Person 
concerned is to God what no other can be; and (2) 
That He is also what no other can be to man. 
The first expresses the unique allegiance and loy- 
alty which all Christians acknowledge to Christ; 
the second, the unique debt which they owe to 
Him. ' ' It does not break with the past as do some 
with "a new theology with its critical knowledge 
and its airy intolerance." It does not bind men 
to a dead body of non-essentials that forever divide 
and separate. The attitude of this uniting confes- 
sion is that already held by the vast majority of 

123 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

evangelical Churches. It is, moreover, the histor- 
ical attitude of the New Testament. "They ac- 
knowledge that in their spiritual life it is His to 
determine everything, and that they are infinitely 
and forever His debtors.' ' "With this fundamental 
conception lacking, the Christianity of the New 
Testament loses its religious unity. It is absolutely 
essential to its life and perpetuity. Without it 
Protestantism as well as Roman Catholicism would 
be an empty form, sounding brass, and tinkling 
cymbals. Both would die, and there would be few 
to mourn. This much of a confession at least, with 
all it implies, we must insist on as a basis of fu- 
ture reunion of divided Protestantism, Greek and 
Roman Catholicism that may some day take place, 
when all alike shall put less stress on outgrown 
dogmas and non-essentials. 

The intolerance of the Vatican, its assumption 
of infallible authority, its claims of temporal 
power, the arrogation of divine functions of for- 
giveness, its infallible errors of holding the keys 
of heaven and hell in their hands, the attempts 
to dam the stream of thought and religious freedom 
with threats of excommunication, — must pass away 
before that day dawns. Protestantism, too, will 
have her sins to confess in sackcloth and ashes ; but 
our dreams and visions look forward to a glorious 

124 



IS PROTESTANTISM PASSING? 

consummation of time's travail, when the king- 
doms of this world shall in truth become the King- 
doms of our Lord and His Christ, when a reunited 
Christendom shall bow the knee before Him and 
every tongue confess Him Lord of lords and King 
of kings. 

" All hail the power of Jesus' name, 
Let angels prostrate fall. 
Bring forth the royal diadem 
And crown Him Lord of all." 



125 



Is the Church Losing Its Grip? 



" For as the lightning that lighteneth out of the one part under heaven, 
shineth into the other part under heaven ; so shall the Son of man be in 
His day. "— Luke 17: 24. 

"If I were a committee of one to report on the condition of the world 
to-day, I think I should report progress. The world is getting ahead. It 
may not seem so when we look around, but when we look back and take 
a historic survey, we can see that we have come a long way, . . . God 's 
world and man 's world mix in very wonderful ways, and we are a part 
of both. We receive the commission to further this world and help it on 
toward the divine consummation. "—Borden P. Bowne. 

" Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 

And not on paper leaves or leaves of stone ; 
Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it, 
Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan. 
While swings the sea, while mists the mountains shroud, 
While thunder 's surges burst on cliffs of cloud, 
Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit." 

— Lowell. 

" Before the monstrous wrong he sets him down,— 
One man against a stone-walled city of sin, 
For centuries those walls have been abuilding — . . . 
But by and by earth shakes herself impatient, 
And down in one great roar of ruin 
Crash watchtower and citadel and battlements, 
After the red dust has cleared away, the lonely soldier 
Stands with strange thoughts beneath the friendly stars. " 

—The Reformer by Sill. 



VII 

IS THE CHURCH LOSING ITS GRIP? 

"We are incorrigibly optimistic. We trust this does 
not hinder our seeing things in proper perspective, 
but are certain it will prevent our losing heart. 
We shall, however, endeavor to divest ourselves of 
such prejudices as would pervert our vision, even 
though the fact that our sympathies lie against the 
pessimist may not be in slightest doubt. 

We find ourselves in a mood of apology for 
using the interrogatory form for the title of our 
discussion. It is so readily misunderstood by the 
shallow and superficial. An affirmative reply is so 
glibly made by the cynic. Not difficult is it to 
paint the past in color of rose, because one has 
forgotten, and the present in lamp-black, because 
one has lost heart. Every evil tendency observed 
about him by the melancholic pessimist throws him 
into a panic, like a cry of "fire." The cheapest 
sort of superficial logic employed by one who lacks 
historical perspective or vital faith is the indiscrim- 
inate charge that the world is retrograding, that the 
Church needs but to lift up its eyes to behold the 
9 129 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

handwriting of its doom on the walls of time, that 
the faithful would do well to prepare to lifeboats, 
as the old hulk is about to break up. We are re- 
minded of that forlorn soul who discovered that 

" The sun's heat will give out in ten million years 
more, — 

And he worried about it. 
It will surely give out, so the scientists said 
In all scientific books he had read, 
And the whole boundless universe then will be 
dead — 

And he worried about it." 

But the deeper insight is that our world is roll- 
ing more and more into the light. Progress, though 
slow, is being made. We live in the grandest day 
yet vouchsafed unto man. 

" I find the earth not green, but rosy, 
Heaven not gray, but fair of hue, 
Do I stoop ? I pluck a posy, 
Do I stand and stare ? All 's blue." 

Let us look into this a little. 

I. Church and Kingdom. 
The Church as the organized body of Christian 
believers, regardless of creed or denomination, dif- 
fers from the invisible Kingdom of God, which in- 
cludes every soul that trusts Him. ' ' Other sheep I 
have," said Jesus, "which are not of this fold." 
Kingdom is a wider word than Church. It is con- 
ceivable, therefore, that the Church, as such, might 

130 



IS THE CHUECH LOSING ITS GRIP? 

be losing ground, when the Kingdom was progress- 
ing. A variety of causes might contribute to this 
contrariety. Nevertheless, as time rolls on and the 
Church purines herself and prepares for the com- 
ing of the Bridegroom, the two will coalesce. 

The Church, however, must never be conceived 
as confined to individuals or its own particular or- 
ganism. Its power and influence permeate all our 
modern life : ethical, philanthropic, and industrial ; 
political, intellectual, and aesthetic, as well as re- 
ligious. The Church, as such, may not presume to 
regulate the affairs of State nor preserve the spirit 
and power of democratic institutions. Its vital 
principles, however, permeate them like heaven, 
and its righteousness is the hidden secret of their 
perpetuity and progress. 

Nor does the Church exist for its own sake, but 
for the sake of the people. It is not an end; it 
is but a means. When it ceases to serve, to bless, 
to console, to save, to reveal Christ to men, let it 
die. Let something else that will undertake this 
task, assume its place. It has no raison d'etre ex- 
cept that graven on the royal arms, "Ich dien," 
I serve. Like Christ, it came not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister. It rflust be supported and 
sustained, as an organization, by its constituency, 
near or far; but when it ceases to do anything but 

131 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

make motions or perpetuate hollow forms or preach 
an empty gospel, let it perish! The world will 
little care nor long remember. Like a cut flower, 
with color and fragrance gone, it will wither and 
die, as it ought to do. 

Propounding the question, Is it losing its grip? 
in no sense implies, therefore, 'that as a system 
of slavery or oppression its power of repression or 
shackles of bondage may be loosening, or that it 
can be charged, leechlike, with sucking the life- 
blood of the people, to its own official or hierarch- 
ical advantage. An organization that, like Judas, 
sells its Lord for thirty pieces of silver, more or 
less, ought to expect no more happy ending for its 
simony. 

II. Is the Church Losing Its Grip? 

Let us take a glance at statistics. Discussions 
of this question frequently overlook two important 
items: (1) the distinction that should be made be- 
tween the situation in Protestant and Roman Cath- 
olic countries, and (2) the local variations in a 
given country due to emigration or immigration, 
which really signify no change in the total number 
of communicants. The increase of Roman Catho- 
lics in Germany in recent years is largely to be 
accounted for by the immigration thereto of Poles, 

132 



IS THE CHURCH LOSING ITS GRIP! 

Italians, and Catholic Swiss; while a large share 
of Roman Catholic increase in America in the last 
decade is accountable by reason of the average im- 
migration of nearly 800,000 annually during that 
time, predominantly from Southern Europe — Cath- 
olic countries. Undoubtedly, too, the presence of 
an aggressive Protestantism in any country is both 
a check and an inspiration to Romanism itself. 

It is undeniable, as Modernists affirm, that in 
countries like Italy, France, Spain, and the South 
American States thousands of men have lost all 
faith and vital connection with Catholicism and 
even the essentially Christian ideas beneath its en- 
crusted and outgrown dogmas, its unprogressive- 
ness and intellectual repression, its superstitions 
and intolerance, and have drifted into indifference 
and skepticism. This everywhere furnishes a har- 
vest field for a sane, progressive, and tolerant Prot- 
estantism. While the faith of hundreds is decay- 
ing, a large number are being born anew in the 
vital atmosphere and unobscured gospel of Jesus 
Christ. Unless the reactionary tendencies within 
the Roman Churches are converted, the resulting 
disintegration is bound to continue. 

Protestantism seems everywhere to be progress- 
ing except in one country, viz., Germany. In the 
United States last year the Protestant rate of in- 

133 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

crease was 2.2 per cent, as compared with 1.8 per 
cent increase in population and 1.8 per cent in- 
crease in Roman Catholicism. Thus the rate of 
Protestant increase during 1909 was greater than 
the growth in population and the rate in the Cath- 
olic Church. Moreover, the total seating capacity 
of Church edifices increased in sixteen years (1890- 
1906) by 14,976,767 (or 34.4 per cent), totaling 
58,536,830. 

The growth in seating capacity for the churches 
has kept pace with the growth in population, being 
33.6 per cent for Protestants and 33.3 for Catholics. 
When it is remembered that the seating capacity of 
the churches in the United States is over two-thirds 
of the entire population, and for the Protestants 
over three times the average membership per 
Church, and that an average of eight churches a 
day are being built annually, some of the pessi- 
mistic jeremiads concerning the modern decrease in 
Church interest and attendance lose their terror. 

On the other hand, the latest statistics from 
Germany show a very disheartening loss of ground 
among all Churches. Though for some thirty years 
one thousand to two thousand annually broke away 
from the State Churches in Prussia, in 1904, 1905, 
and 1906 a sudden jump was noticed (8,802 in 
1904, 9,158 in 1905, and 12,007 in 1906). During 

134 



IS THE CHURCH LOSING ITS GRIP? 

the last three years 17,000 working people in Ber- 
lin alone have been affected by the away-from-the- 
Chnrch agitation. Five extra clerks had to be en- 
gaged in the Cultus Mimsterium to attend to the 
new business of dismissing those who were break- 
ing away. Socialism, economic conditions, destruc- 
tive criticism of the Word, have been laying their 
axes at the foundation pillars of the Churches. 
And yet it is noteworthy that only 4,270 in Ger- 
many register themselves as free-thinkers, without 
religion, a thing remarkable in the land of Strauss, 
Lasalle, Engel, Krautsky, and Nietzsche. Says 
Professor Rauschenbusch concerning the situation 
in Germany: "For a long time the German State 
Church took no sympathetic interest in the Social- 
ist movement. It preached loyalty to the King, 
the divine necessity of social classes, submission, 
and godly patience. A Socialist was a heathen 
and a publican. It was generally denied that a 
man could be both a Socialist and a Christian. The 
Socialists in their propaganda constantly encoun- 
tered the Church as a spiritual and social force 
defending the existing social order, a bulwark of 
privilege and conservatism. They could gain a 
man for Socialism only by undermining the author- 
ity of the Church over his mind. " (Page 321, 
in "Christianity and Social Crisis.") 

135 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

On the other hand, such erratic and destructive 
German critics as Jensen, Pfleiderer, and Zimmern, 
outdoing Strauss, who seriously set themselves to 
the task of proving Christ a myth, has had its 
effect in undermining the faith of the people, re- 
sulting in their loss of religion and in a great 
falling away from the Church. 

III. Threatening TexNtdencies and Problems 
Confronting the Church op To-Day. 

1. Deeper than the more superficial indications 
of the statistical table lie both the perils and the 
hope of the Church. 

It is not without a show of truth that serious- 
minded students of the Zeitgeist and the tendencies 
in the Church discern certain threatening condi- 
tions abroad. It is charged that there is a decay 
of authority both in family and Church life; that 
there is at present a lack of proper religious edu- 
cation even among those who pretend to give it; 
that there is an all-too-prevalent separation of re- 
ligion and life, of Christian principles and com- 
mercial ideas, of the Golden Rule and economic 
laws; that social and political factors have escaped 
from the direct influence of the Church as a 
Church; that it has lost its moral leadership and 
begun the exploitation of bizarre and naturalistic 

136 



IS THE CHUECH LOSING ITS GBIP? 

notions substituted for the eternal gospel ; that the 
pulpit has ceased to make the saving of men from 
sin and error its greatest work, but is concerned 
more in setting afloat trial balloons of "new the- 
ologies," so called, which in some respects are 
neither new nor properly Christian theology at all. 
All of these indictments deserve the serious atten- 
tion of the Church. They constitute both its prob- 
lem and its peril. It may be that sackcloth and 
ashes, leading to works meet for repentance, will 
be needed to front the situation aright. But do 
not be thrown into a panic, nor unduly alarmed. 
1 ' No religion gains by lapse of time ; it only loses. 
Unless new storms pass over it and cleanse it, it 
will be stifled in its own dry foliage." These 
struggles may be blessings in disguise. Only the 
craven fears to front them. Mechanical and mag- 
ical authority is dying. The presumption of tem- 
poral authority of an infallible Pope is tottering. 
But spiritual authority, derived from God, checked 
and guided in the individual conscience by the 
Scriptures and the "Collective Conscience," is just 
coming to its own, taking deep and vital root in 
modern religious life. Religion, if less punctilious 
as to form, as to passion is far more powerful and 
respectable than it once was. Religious education 
is taking on a profounder meaning and a wider 

137 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

scope than ever before. If the Church seems su- 
perficially to have lost moral leadership or the 
control of social and political forces, it is partly 
in the seeming. Direct control is now as ever sub- 
ject to grave dangers and abuses. As a Church it 
no longer arrogates certain original functions of 
the individual, of the State, or of the social or- 
ganism, which are yet by it shuttled through and 
through; morally weighed, regulated, and con- 
trolled by the principles of Christianity. 

Abortive stampedes in theology are as common 
these days as the fire-alarm. Don't be frightened. 
Some thinker has just knocked over his kerosene 
lamp ; that 's all. He has made a smudge, but 
has no light. Those who are thrown into a panic 
by it, lack historical perspective. In the last gen- 
eration religion for a time was hardly respectable 
in intellectual circles. Materialism, agnosticism, 
and atheism, following the exploitation of the new 
and undigested theory of evolution, occupied the 
limelight and had Christianity on the run. But, 
says Dr. Bowne, "That has all passed away. Re- 
ligion is again intellectually respectable. No one 
thinks of it now as a mere sublimation of animal- 
ism. The way of rational faith was never so open 
as it is to-day. I think quite a number of ques- 
tions, such as those of atheism and materialism, 

138 



IS THE CHURCH LOSING ITS GRIP? 

have been fought to a finish, definitely settled, 
never to be taken up again unless there be a re- 
turn to intellectual barbarism. We know the worst 
that can be said." As for "new theologies," any 
one these days who has some airy vagary to exploit 
puts that label on it and rushes into print. Such 
attempts have been made before. Concerning 
Comte's "religion of humanity" "it is impossible 
to speak with gravity." Mr. Spencer gave the 
world his "religion of the unknoAvable" without 
altars, shrines, inspiration, or stimulus to right liv- 
ing. But it is dead. So will these smoking torches 
die away, leaving not even a smudge behind. The 
faith of some may be shaken in the conflict, but 
it will be steadied again, and God will make even 
the doubts of men, if honest, to praise Him. 

2. The Social Crisis is undoubtedly the most 
serious problem confronting the Church. It threat- 
ens its perpetuity if not solved, but offers a mag- 
nificent opportunity if grappled with. 

The working classes, if they do not name the 
threatening tendencies already noted, declare some- 
times they believe that the Church has lost vital 
interest in the common people and their welfare; 
that the Church ought to represent the Christ-spirit 
on the earth in social and economic relations. The 
future is either to behold a social Christianity come 

139 



THE GKEATEST THINGS IN EELIGION. 

to fullness and flower, or else a deluge. They de- 
clare that the unequal conditions of our modern 
life, the high cost of living preventing the wage 
earners from properly supporting their Church as 
both pride and loyalty demand, the growth side by 
side of the immensely rich and the abjectly poor — 
the first but little concerned with Christianity, the 
second compelled to wretchedness and sin by its 
poverty — is bound to take away the sinews of war 
in men and money from the Church until its ability 
to minister to the highest welfare of humanity will 
be greatly impaired, if not paralyzed. There are 
signs of social unrest among the masses, min- 
gled discontent and bitterness. Some think they 
behold in the average Church member the con- 
servative bulwark of a social order which is essen- 
tially un-Christian. Paradoxically they begin to 
laud Christ, but curse the Church, or at least pass 
it by with indifference and scorn. They declare 
that they can not afford Church-life, and their in- 
difference is more the result of poverty than un- 
belief. It is no plea for the "hobo" they make. 
"Hoboes," whether rich or poor, are alike para- 
sites on society, sucking its lifeblood. Frequently 
they behold employers, in whose Christianity, as 
applied to every-day industrial life they have no 
confidence, separating religion and business, occu- 

140 



IS THE CHUECH LOSING ITS GRIP? 

pying the chief places in the synagogues, and they 
scorn to make application to be seated even in the 
"lowest room." Or the demands upon their phys- 
ical and nervous forces are so great in these mod- 
ern times that they have no spirit or strength left 
for Church work or Christian service. They per- 
ceive instinctively that commercial ethics and 
Christian ethics are hostile, the one to the other, 
and, like two antagonistic spirits, are grappling 
for the mastery ; that questions of personal mo- 
rality and virtue are bound up with the sinister 
influences of our modern industrial life, and that 
the Church must master them or be mastered by 
them. The bitterest are even led at times by their 
wrongs, fancied and real, to doubt the fundamental 
goodness of the universe and its God. 

Too often the proletariat has found distinct and 
definite antagonism within the Church to their 
most precious and unselfishly idealistic dreams, and 
have turned away chilled and wounded, and broken 
in spirit. As a logical result of this, many of these 
men, with their human souls full of guilt and 
"longings for holiness and the deathless life," get 
out of touch with Christ and the Church, and 
though they may labor for social regeneration, 
themselves lack forever the glory and peace of indi- 
vidual regeneration. ' ' There are two great entities 

141 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

in human life" says Rauschenbusch, "the human 
soul and the human race — religion is to save both. 
The soul is to seek righteousness 'and eternal 
life. The race is to seek righteousness and the 
Kingdom of God." (Page 367.) "It has always 
been recognized that the creation of regenerate per- 
sonalities pledged to righteousness is one of the 
most important services which the Church can 
render to social progress. But regeneration merely 
creates the will to do right; it does not define for 
man what is right." (Page 354.) "It is doubtless 
true that the interest in the social question is apt 
to overshadow the other aspects of religion. Ab- 
sorbed in public questions such men forget to ap- 
peal to the individual soul for repentance and to 
comfort those in sorrow. That is a sore defect. 
The human soul with its guilt and its longing for 
holiness and the deathless life is a permanent fact 
in religion, and no social perfection will quench 
its hunger for the living God." (Page 366.) 

All of this and more constitutes the present so- 
cial crisis confronting the world and the Church. 
It must be met, not by bitterness and invective, 
class hatred or scorn. We stand on the thresh- 
old of a social revolution, that will come, not 
with violence, let us hope, but with steady evolution 
and with the certainty that Christ's right and 

142 



IS THE CHURCH LOSING ITS GRIP? 

power to reign will be demonstrated. All of the 
claims and demands of the working-classes are 
neither rational nor desirable. The great yearn- 
ings and instinctive appeals to Christ and to men, 
that call themselves Christians, are divine in their 
origin. Christian business men will one day cease, 
perhaps, to make a fetich of our present wage 
system. Modifications in the social organism are 
bound to come, are even now being made. Some 
day a Christian Cooperative Commonwealth may 
not be a fatuous dream, but the logical sequence of 
the evolution of present-day Christianity. 

"What is needed in the pulpit to-day is the 
prophet's vision, the prophet's daring, the proph- 
et 's voice. If those who are so busy making ' ' new 
theologies" and shying casters at the faith would 
only come up and begin to recast Christian theology 
in its social aspects, their other frequent sins might 
be overlooked. Brilliant powers and abilities, to 
say nothing of magnificent opportunities, are 
wasted in the vain and thankless task of "blasting 
at the Rock of Ages." "If the Church tries to 
confine itself to theology and the Bible and refuses 
the larger mission to humanity, its theology will 
gradually become mythology and its Bible a closed 
Book." 1 

l Rauschenbusch. 

143 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

0, for one day of Elijah and Isaiah and John 
the Baptist ! Imagine Jesus declaring that men are 
to be weighed, rather than counted, when it comes 
to the kingdom of the Church. A new prophetism 
is more needed than a new religion or a new the- 
ology. History has been and is still giving its un- 
reversed verdicts on all such attempts. Let the 
modern pulpit give us something new and vital, 
from God, that will save men and society. ' ' There 
is no creature more fatal than your pedant; safe 
as he esteems himself, the terrible issues spring 
from him. Human crimes are many, but the crime 
of being deaf to God's voice, of being blind to all 
but parchments and antiquarian rubrics when the 
divine handwriting is abroad on the sky — certainly 
there is no crime which the Supreme Powers do 
more terribly avenge. ' n 

IV. Four Great Modern Movements in the 
Church. 

Thank God the Church is not wholly unmind- 
ful of her problems and opportunities. We are 
still incorrigible optimists. Four great modern 
movements in the Church are filled with the glory 
and flower of youthful hope: (1) A new and more 
intelligent emphasis, in Church and school alike, 

l Carly le. 

144 



IS THE CHURCH LOSING ITS GRIP? 

upon religious education. Religion is now seen to 
be one of the greatest factors in life, one of the 
indispensable elements of culture, and one of the 
essentials of education of any kind. All life is 
spanned with the rainbow, and girded beneath by 
the solid ground of religion. (2) Modern forms of 
loyal obedience to Christ's last great commands, 
together with the exhibition of love for Him and 
humanity, in the great missionary and evangelistic 
movements of our day. In our day there has come 
an unprecedented consecration of wealth, culture, 
time, and men to the cause of Christ. A glorious 
vision has been born anew of "a world that can 
be evangelized, of a world that shall be evangelized, 
and of a Christ worthy to become the subject of a 
world-wide evangel. " Men are saying that we 
are the people to do it. (3) The awakening of the 
social conscience of the Church. This is coming 
slowly but surely. Some prophets of the vision 
have lifted up their voices, some may even yet be 
stoned for their temerity. It is not an easy thing 
to say to modern men who are really sinning 
against the Golden Rule, as Nathan did to David, 
"Thou art the man." But only a craven of a 
prophet will smother his message. It will be diffi- 
cult for men to alter the habits of a lifetime, to 
give up the customs and prejudices of a Christless 
10 145 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

political economy. " Savonarola was a great demo- 
crat as well as a religious prophet, ' ' says Rauschen- 
busch. "In his famous interview with the dying 
Lorenzo Di Medici he made three demands of him, 
as a condition for granting absolution. Of the man 
he demanded a living faith in God's mercy. Of the 
millionaire he demanded restitution of his ill-gotten 
wealth. Of the political usurper he demanded the 
restoration of the liberties of the people of Flor- 
ence. It is significant that the dying sinner found 
it easy to assent to the first, hard to consent to the 
second, and impossible to concede the last." (Page 
335, Rauschenbusch. ) (4) Present-day building 
of a modern constructive theology, with less empha- 
sis upon non-essentials, but with greater and more 
constructive emphasis upon the fundamentals of 
Christianity ; with less search for causes of division, 
and more exhibition of fraternal harmony and 
unity, at least among the evangelical denomina- 
tions. 

This is the Master's Day! Let us not individ- 
ually get out of step and tune with the great move- 
ments of the immanent Christ among men to-day. 
This is the Master's Day. And the lightning that 
lighteneth the one part under heaven is shining 
unto the other part under heaven. This old world 
of ours is rolling into light. 

146 



What of the Future of Christianity? 



" And I saw, and behold a white horse : and he that sat on him had a 
bow ; and a crown was given unto him : and he went forth conquering and 
to conquer. " — Rev. 6 : 2. 

"I saw what you women would call a clothes-hamper — a large wicker 
basket — filled with the bodies of little dead babies which the keeper of the 
place told me had been gathered up in the drunken hovels of that one town 
that one day. A clothes-basket of babies, as sweet and as innocent and as 
deserving as ever were born, lying there with their little shut fists upraised 
where death had frozen them, clutching at love in the darkness— poor 
little things !— and calling to the Christian nation, Life !— Life !— Life ! "— 
John G. Woolley. 

OPPORTUNITY. 
" This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream : 
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain. 
And underneath the cloud or in it, raged 
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords 
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner 
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes, ; 
A craven hung along the battle 's edge 
And thought, ' Had I a sword of keener steel — 
That blue blade that the king 's son bears— but this 
Blunt thing— ! ' He snapt and flung it from his hand, 
And lowering, crept away and left the field, 
Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead, 
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, 
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand, 
And ran and snatched it, and with battle shout 
Lifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down, 
And saved a great cause that heroic day." 

—Sill. 

* Our great business with Christianity is to proceed upon it. " 

— Chalmers. 

M When you walk toward the sun all your shadows are behind you. " 

— Anon. 



VIII 

"WHAT OF THE FUTURE OF CHRIS- 
TIANITY ?" 

Now a birdseye view of the ground we have 
traversed, with a look into the future. We are 
neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but 
certain signs are blazing in the sky which the way- 
faring man, though a fool, may read. Will Chris- 
tianity be superseded as a religion? It is but one 
step in an evolution of religions? Is it but a little 
system that will have its day and cease to be, or 
has it within itself the elements of finality? Is 
Christianity one of many, or is it the religion? 
Admitting it will change, will it be so modified as 
to be abandoned for something else, like a derelict 
at sea, or a locomotive on the junk-heap? Or will 
its rich and unfolding essence satisfy the ages, 
while ever fresh interpretations and applications 
of its eternal truth are brought out? What forms, 
inner and outer, is it destined to assume? We 

149 



THE GEEATEST THINGS IN EELIGION. 

should need far more knowledge than our present 
limitations permit, to answer some of these inter- 
rogations, but the general outlook is not difficult 
to discern. Let us make a survey of some of our 
backgrounds and foregrounds, of the retrospects 
and prospects. 

I. The Competitors of Christianity are 
partly within and partly without, some facing it 
abroad and some facing it at home. They are both 
an opportunity and a problem, at once a stimulus 
and a peril. Sweeping the eye over the nations, 
one perceives hoary old world-religions with mil- 
lions of adherents. Religion always has been and 
always will be the chief concern of life ; for eternal 
interests outweigh the temporal, and, though the 
souls of men find the temporal object loved with 
greater ardor in pursuit than possession, they dis- 
cover that the eternal object, however high a value 
they may set upon it in pursuit, is even more soul- 
satisfying in possession. Hence it is inevitable that 
Christianity and the world-religions should come 
into competition in their endeavor to satisfy the 
deepest longings of the human heart. There was 
a moment in history when Christianity was dead, 
as Christ's disciples beheld the crucifixion of its 
Founder; but on the third day the risen Lord be- 
came the Conquering Power of the new and final 

150 



"WHAT OF FUTURE CHRISTIANITY !" 

religion which was destined to go forth conquering 
and to conquer. Arising with a band of eleven 
humble but baptized disciples, the first Christian 
Church, born at a time when some of the ethnic 
religions were tottering under the weight of years, 
Christianity has now reached the first flush only 
of its youthful strength, with nearly 500,000,000 
adherents, about double that of its nearest competi- 
tor, Confucianism (256,000,000), with the other 
world-religions ranged in descending figures. (The 
latest competent authority, M. Faurnier de Flaix, 
gives as these statistics: Hindooism, 190,000,000; 
Mohammedanism, 176,834,372 ; Buddhism, 147,- 
900,000; Taoism, 43,000,000; Shintoism, 14,000,- 
000; Judaism, 7,186,000; Polytheism, 17,681,669.) 
Christianity is, moreover, filled with spiritual 
vitality and is gaining ground, while these world- 
old religions, without exception, lack in these very 
characteristics. A flaming missionary like Judson 
or Carey or Livingstone or a Taylor or a Thoburn. 
a mighty evangelist like a Moody or a Gipsy Smith 
or a Chapman, are unknown to these hoary old 
religions. Doubtless they contained a partial rev- 
elation of God, for He has not left Himself without 
witness among any people; but their visions are 
imperfect, broken lights, obscured with error and 
mist. None of them contain a world-Savior like 

151 



THE GEEATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

Jesus Christ. There is a cosmopolitanism about 
Him that moves and attracts every man who be- 
holds Him in His beauty, without regard to race 
or religion. These are just the qualities which 
Confucianism and Gautama, the Buddha, lack. 
They have proved themselves impotent to produce 
a type of character approaching the Christian. 
Nothing can rival the richness and power of the 
Christian's inner experience, least of all can the 
mysticism and longing for unconsciousness of the 
Buddhistic Nirvana do so. With one stroke they 
fail, in buoyancy of hope, the glory of righteous- 
ness, and moral quality; in their conceptions of 
sin, joy of salvation, peace in God, and hope of 
immortality, so wondrously interknit with Chris- 
tian faith. Says Cuthbert Hall: "Great are the 
burdens weighing down the soul of the East ; blind- 
ing and suffocating are the webs of illusion and 
fatalism bound upon it ; enthralling is the pride of 
tradition; dark is the shadow of the ethical ob- 
scurity enveloping it." (Page 303, "Universal 
Elements of Christian Keligion.") Yet, when one 
looks into the eyes of the Orient and sees the soul- 
hunger, the latent potency for divine communion, 
and the mighty religious aspirations shining out of 
the wreckage of these old faiths, instantly the 
Christians know Christ has the vision of God that 

152 



"WHAT OF FUTURE CHRISTIANITY !" 

will satisfy their quenchless yearnings. Christi- 
anity has already brought to the East a body of 
spiritual truth, the Christian ideal of life, and a 
type of inner experience through the world-Savior, 
which is, like yeast, beginning to leaven the whole 
lump. And they acknowledge the need of all this.- 
It is the unconscious witness of humanity to the 
Cross. Christ is bound to go forth in the East con- 
quering and to conquer. Their central personali- % 
ties are morally inadequate to deal with perversi- 
ties of the human heart, conscience, and will. They 
can not vitalize a soul dead in trespasses and sins. 
No one they reverence matches the Peerless Christ. 
"They have no equivalent for His power," says 
Hall, "to create the fundamental instincts and mo- 
tives of the soul, to purge and reorganize the af- 
fections, to endue with the power of the Spirit. 
The older religions are weakening because of 
moral inadequacy, and in their weakness are be- 
coming corrupt ; they are trying to arrest the proc- 
ess of corruption by assimilating the salt of the 
ethics of Jesus, while He, standing more conspicu- 
ously than ever before the eyes of the whole race, 
the Desire of all nations, the Transformer of social 
ideals, the Regenerator of motives, the Absolver 
from sins, is extending His influence and multiply- 
ing His triumphs as a Savior of the world." This 

153 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

is the witness of the world to the coming triumph 
of Christianity. It is manifest destiny. 

But there are also competitors at home, both 
within and without the Church. The greatest 
thinkers declare that the battle of Christianity with 
atheism and materialism has been fought to a 
finish. These antagonists of Christianity are dead, 
never to be revived again, unless mankind ' ' reverts 
to intellectual barbarism. ' ' There are several other 
tendencies observable, thrown up like foam by the 
surf, on the shoreline of the ocean of Christianity. 
An attempt is discernible in some quarters to sub- 
stitute a pantheistic nature-worship for the ancient 
way of Christianity. It is a science which pro- 
fesses no religion but universal law, a kind of non- 
religious ethics freed from the old pious restric- 
tions of conduct, an attempt to satisfy with the 
hazy and airy penumbra of culture, the thirst for 
light, absolving itself from the traditional beliefs. 
Sometimes its suggestions of personal Gethsemanes 
rise to the fore, as the tragedy of some human 
spirit is discovered beneath the otherwise calm ex- 
terior. Or perchance another attempts to satisfy 
his quenchless spiritual needs with social activity, 
robbed of the dynamic of the Presence of Christ, 
denuded of ecclesiasticism, to be sure, but also cut 
off from the saving grace, the burden-bearing, the 

154 



"WHAT OF FUTUKE CHRISTIANITY V 9 

consolation in grief of the Savior of men. An un- 
usual popularity nowadays attaches also to cer- 
tain "isms" which declare they desire the good of 
men, and by means of healing suggestions or 
psychological reactions profess to have the touch- 
stone of health and the secret of eternal youth. 
While some of them profess to base their tenets 
on the teachings of Christ and desire only the good 
of men, so much of error is mingled with their 
claims that, though they are not declared enemies, 
they are, nevertheless, competitors of Christianity. 
Concerning all these it may be said that they would 
eliminate much that is Christian, substitute some- 
thing else for the supreme will of God, as well as 
deny and derogate the Saviorship of Christ. If it 
be said, "nevertheless Christ is preached/' it must 
be answered, that is exactly not the case. 

Doubtless some of these "isms" have certain 
elements of truth in them. If so, they will but 
serve to emphasize the segments of the great circle 
of Christian truth. But their errors will preclude 
them from general acceptance. By and by they 
will go the way of atheism and materialism, and 
no one will seriously espouse them, unless he has 
dropped back into spiritual barbarism. "The 
world, the flesh, and the devil" as antagonists of 
Christianity will doubtless be with us until the 

155 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

millennium, but Jesus saw Satan fall, as lightning, 
from heaven, and the final end of his reign on the 
earth is certain as fate. The Christian disciple 
may base his optimism both on that prediction and 
also on the evident signs everywhere that this old 
world is slowly rolling into light. Christ has gone 
forth conquering and to conquer. 

II. The Progress of Christianity. 1. Chris- 
tianity, in the essence of its fundamentals, is time- 
less and eternal, but as a system of doctrines and as 
a complex of customs and institutions has been 
progressing from age to age. The same will doubt- 
less be true of the future as of the past. That con- 
ceptions of Christian doctrines or duties are static 
is an antedated notion. Who holds such a view 
is behind the times, stranded and imbedded like a 
fossil on the beach of thought. Both the Old and 
the New Testament contain the record of God's 
progressive revelation through the minds and re- 
ligious experience of His chosen instruments of 
mediation and inspiration. It is more exact to say 
that the Bible is a record of such a developing rev- 
elation of God, than the statement that every syl- 
lable in it is the Word of God. The prophets, one 
by one, proclaimed to their times a message from 
the Most High needed by their times. As the prog- 
ress of social, moral, intellectual, and religious evo- 

156 



"WHAT OF FUTUEE CHKISTIANITYr' 

lution went on, their voices took on ever higher 
notes and qualities, their eyes beheld ever loftier 
visions and prospects. 

2. In Jesus Christ the fullness of God's reve- 
lation was made. Ever since Christianity has 
simply been moving toward Him. The cry should 
be not "Back to Christ," but "Forward to 
Christ." And the expectation of every thoughtful 
Christian is that the future is to develop a more 
resplendent Christianity. The future of Christian- 
ity will," both in the living of it and the conceiving 
of it, climb toward Him in moral and religious and 
doctrinal imitation. Undoubtedly the Orient will 
contribute some rich world-elements to the com- 
plete understanding of the Christ when they be- 
hold Him in His beauty and begin to interpret 
Him to the world. Jesus was an Oriental, nine- 
tenths of the world are Oriental in their thinking, 
and this will profoundly affect the Christian con- 
ception of the Christ that shall dawn on the minds 
of men in the radiant future. His spirit will ever 
be incarnated and reincarnated in the Church of 
the future; for every man, in his interpretations 
of the Bible as well as of Christian belief and prac- 
tice, comes to them with certain presuppositions 
characteristic of his age and of his own mental 
and moral history. The unpardonable error of any 

157 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

man is to suppose that the little pool of his own 
mind and apprehension is the whole ocean of Chris- 
tian truth. 

A very little thing, morally or mentally, like a 
penny held before the eye, obscuring the universe, 
will shut out the truth. Humility and open- 
mindedness are the first requisites of the scholar, 
as presumption and arrogance are their own refu- 
tation. 

" Our little systems have their day, 

They have their day and cease to be ; 
They are but broken lights of Thee 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

3. But there is peril and hazard in this freedom 
of thought and in the changing mental order. 
Some have lost their way. Like blind guides, they 
are attempting to lead others equally as blind. 
Both have fallen into the ditch. The philosophical 
and historical critics who have been endeavoring 
to exorcise the scholastic and the metaphysical dev- 
ils from Christian doctrine, leave the body empty, 
to become the prey of seven other devils worse 
than the ones cast out, and the last state of it 
is worse than the first. Our day has witnessed a 
reaction from the ponderous scholastical theological 
terms once used to describe the eternal verities 
they really obscured. But in that revolt some have 

158 



"WHAT OF FUTUKE CHRISTIANITY!" 

hastily concluded there was no reality beneath 
them. In the process of recovering the historical 
portrait of Jesus they have become really unhistor- 
ical. By burning up the rubbish of erroneous tra- 
ditions they have destroyed the master painting 
which they intended to bring forth to the world. 
But the ultra-historical school has produced but 
a momentary reaction. The Christ-likeness of God 
was not a thing manufactured by the Church. It 
was revealed in life and blood, in soul and cross, 
in character and resurrection, by Christ Himself. 
The reaction from the metaphysical brought forth 
an admirable practical discipline as well as some 
new and undiscovered radiance in Jesus of Naza- 
reth and in God the Father as well; but, pushed 
to the extremity of complete denial, it loses out 
the dynamic of the Christian religion. It is not 
big enough for the human spirit. It whittles down 
its Christ to a mutilated shadow. ''It cuts the 
wings of the soul, and reduces the scale and meas- 
ure of its thinking," says Hall. "It can not meet 
this craving of the human spirit, which knows but 
too well those hours when the metaphysical is the 
only outlet of the pent-up sense of infinity. It 
can not produce the type of character which has 
been the glory of every Christian age: character 
steeped in metaphysical conceptions of God in 

159 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

Christ, of Christ in the soul of man, of man ab- 
solved by sacrificial love, transfigured by the re- 
generating grace of the incarnate God. It can not 
grapple with the problems of the Christianization 
of the world in lands where the historical counts 
little, and where he only has power who bears the 
message like in the terms of its philosophical equiv- 
alents." (Hall, page 145, "Universal Elements of 
Christianity.") The remolding of Christian doc- 
trine and the recasting of religious thought will 
revolve around the Christian and will center in 
the old essentials of the Christian faith. Here one 
must discern between the false prophet and the 
true with the eye of Jesus Himself. ' ' The apostles 
of Christianity are challenged, and its advance 
hindered, not so much by declared enemies as by 
one-sided adherents who would indignantly dis- 
claim opposition to its influence." (Rev. Harry 
Jones, M. A.) 

III. Is Christianity the Final Religion? 
What Are Its Universal Elements ? The Chris- 
tian religion of the future as in the past will 
be Christo-centric. Attempts to explain away its 
Founder as a mythical person are both pathetic 
and amusing. Some men seem as unable to get 
this fixed idea out of their heads as a paranoiac 
his mania. The dynamic of the Christian religion 

160 



"WHAT OF FUTURE CHRISTIANITY !" 

was originally and is now the Person of Christ. 
His eloquence, his ethics, his wise sayings, and his 
benevolence were but accessory to the main Fig- 
ure. The logical result of this obsession to dislodge 
Christ from His exalted place is to take the heart 
out of the gospel. Robbing Christianity of its Sav- 
ior is to despoil the world of the hope of redemp- 
tion, its universal dynamic of righteousness, holi- 
ness, and heaven. 

Jesus claimed to reveal the final religion to 
men. The generations have discovered the claim 
well founded. Christianity possesses certain eter- 
nal qualities which make it independent of the 
evolutionary advances of the race, except in match- 
ing it and beckoning it on, and certain universal 
elements which witness that it is destined to pro- 
vide the satisfaction and salvation of all mankind. 
In the search for the essence of Christianity some 
great and scholarly men have dwelt too much upon 
the historical Jesus, to the exclusion of Him as the 
Redeemer. "The effects of this are already ap- 
pearing in the impoverished religious values of the 
sermons produced by the younger generation of 
preachers, and the deplorable decline of spiritual 
life and knowledge in many Churches. Results 
open to observation show that the movement to 
simplify the Christian essence by discarding the 

11 161 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

theology of St. Paul easily carries the teaching of 
the Christian pulpit to a position where, for those 
who submit to that teaching, the characteristic ex- 
periences of the Christian life become practically 
impossible. The Christian sense of sin, Christian 
penitence at the foot of the cross, Christian faith 
in an atoning Savior, Christian peace with God 
through the mediation of Jesus Christ, — these and 
other experiences, which were the very life of 
apostles and of apostolic souls, fade from the view 
of the ministry, have no meaning for the younger 
generations. ' ' 

"We can understand some of the causes for pres- 
ent-day reaction against the mediaeval traditions 
concerning the incarnation which led to a discredit- 
ing of the reality itself. For example, Origen 
taught that the Incarnation was but an act of 
fraud and deceit on the part of God by which He 
surprised and circumvented the devil. "It is by 
means of a certain amount of deceit," says he, 
"that God carried out this scheme on our behalf. 
For that, not by pure Deity alone, but by Deity 
veiled in human nature, God, without the knowl- 
edge of His enemy, got within the lines of him 
who had man in his power, is in some manner a 
fraud and a surprise." One scarcely needs to be 
reminded how utterly erroneous were such ideas, 

162 



"WHAT OF FUTUEE CHRISTIANITY f » 

both of God and of man, and how natural the re- 
volt against them. It was the style and fashion of 
scholasticism to describe the death of Christ as ' ' an 
unjust over-charge," and that the devil was sur- 
prised into exacting a penalty from One who had 
not deserved to incur it. Ambrose referred to the 
incident as "pious fraud;" Augustine called the 
Cross a "mousetrap;" Isidore of Seville "adopted 
the image of a bird caught in a net" to charac- 
terize it. Kufinus and Gregory the Great called 
Christ's human nature a "bait," and spoke of the 
devil as "captured on the hook of the Incarnation, 
and as grasping after the bait of the body and 
transfixed by the hook of the Divinity." Such 
conceptions of the Incarnation and the Cross are 
beset with the gravest difficulties, both intellectual 
and moral. Kepudiating these explanations, how- 
ever, does not invalidate the great central facts of 
the Christian religion. 

The revelation of God through the humanity 
and divinity of Christ ; the presence of God in His 
world and in the hearts of men through the im- 
manent Spirit; the power and dynamic of the 
Cross; the need, the opportunity, and experience 
of human redemption; the Christian motives of 
service; the reality and significance of the resur- 
rection of Christ, together with the awakening of 

163 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN RELIGION. 

the immortal hope of humanity, and all that im- 
plies of Christian experience, knowledge, and life, 
are undying fundamentals of the Christian re- 
ligion. Humanity witnesses to their eternal sig- 
nificance and universal value. The glory and maj- 
esty of these truths are more and more apparent. 
The fullness of the Godhead is in them ; the depths 
of the riches of divine grace are in them; the un- 
speakable gift of God is in them; the treasures of 
wisdom and knowledge are in them ; the depth and 
height and breadth and length of the love of God 
are in them. The growing appreciation of the Bib- 
lical content, the broadening scope of Christian ex- 
perience are disclosing the vast proportions of these 
permanent elements that constitute the essence of 
the Christian religion. It is becoming more ap- 
parent to the earnest religious thinking of our time 
that " these characteristic data of our religion are 
the common possession of all who hold the Chris- 
tian faith and the common opportunity of all peo- 
ple under heaven.' ' 

By this sign Christianity is destined to conquer. 
Everywhere Christianity is accompanied by char- 
acteristic signs. Everywhere it invests life with 
new meaning. Everywhere it develops in men one 
type of religious experience, one ethical outlook, 
one vision of holiness, and one habit of communion 

164 



"WHAT OF FUTUBE CHRISTIANITY!" 

with the living Lord. It is the final religion and is 

destined to conquer the world as the revelation of 

God unto men. Christ's 

" Life, like a dome of many colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity." 

IV. A Forecast op the Future. We are ven- 
turing, finally, upon less certain ground in assum- 
ing the role of a forecaster. One never can fore- 
know what surprises and revolutions will occur in 
the future. Even the dreams of men, if they come 
true, are often far different from the reality itself, 
in its breadth and compass. But, judging by the 
tendencies and signs of our times, which point at 
least the direction the evolution of Christianity 
will take, the future is bound to behold never a 
cessation of the hope and necessity of individual 
redemption, but also a development of the social 
ideals of Christianity in accordance with the ethics 
of Jesus. A social conscience will be evolved sub- 
ordinating every interest to the common good and 
the ideals of the Kingdom of God. His sympathy 
with suffering, His sense of the solidarity with the 
common people, His affinity with democracy, His 
attitude with respect to wealth and poverty, His 
faith in love as the basis of the social order, will 
profoundly affect the ethics of the future, as men 
endeavor to apply those principles of the Christian 

165 



THE GREATEST THINGS IN BELIGION. 

religion as revealed in the Golden Rule, the second 
great commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself," and the eleventh commandment, 
"A new commandment give I unto you, that ye 
should love one another even as also I have loved 
you." 

We make bold to prophesy that the divisiveness 
of Protestantism, after its successful struggle for 
religious liberty, for a spiritual authority, for a 
vital religious faith in salvation, shall have been 
won, will be transformed into a united Protestant- 
ism, which shall begin to realize that dream of a 
magnificent spiritual world-empire it was the mis- 
sion of Christ to found. There will be less em- 
phasis upon the non-essentials and less important 
articles of faith, with unwavering adherence to 
the fundamentals and unswerving loyalty to Jesus 
Christ. Christianity, both at home and on the mis- 
sion fields, calls for this uniting of forces. In this 
connection the noble proposals of the Lambeth Con- 
ference, to establish a fourfold basis of organic 
union, may yet be prophetic of coming history, 
viz., "The Holy Scriptures, the two Sacraments, 
the Catholic Creeds, the Historic Episcopate." 

How dare any man affirm beyond a peradven- 
ture that Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Greek 
Catholics, a mighty triumvirate, purged and puri- 

166 



< ' WHAT OF FUTURE CHRISTIANITY?" 

fied as time rolls on, will never unite their antago- 
nistic and opposing forces under the banner of the 
Christ? If they ever do, they will move forward, 
one solid phalanx, conquering and to conquer, until 
the kingdoms of the world shall become, in truth, 
the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Then 
may a victorious Christianity everywhere send up 
this mighty shout of triumph: 

" Like a mighty army 

Moves the Church of God, 
Brothers, we are treading 

"Where the saints have trod, 
We are not divided, 

All one body we ; 
One in hope and doctrine 

One in charity." 



167 



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